Nashville Moon

After a number of delays in our flight, the first of which was quite welcome as we learned about it before going to bed and it let us sleep later, we have arrived in New York for the memorial of George Jr. 

In recent months I've written a couple of times about Jason Molina, how greatly enriching and encouraging it is to encounter a major voice from out of the blue, and of the irony of how happy it makes me to have made the acquaintance of so deeply melancholy a soul. 

Molina's sadness resonates with me in particular because it is a shame that I discovered him not long after George Jr died. When I first came into the Berridge family, George Jr wss first and foremost a Neil Young fan, and there's a lot of Young in Molina's voice. But then he keeps going to places Young never got. Molina is quieter, more personal and lyrical. He speaks for himself where Young spoke for a generation. In recent weeks I haven't been able to quit listening to him or begin listening to anyone else. I do hope George had made his acquaintance before he passed on, or that perhaps they've become acquainted up there wherever the souls go.

Economic thoughts

For a few minutes there I listened to the press conference in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell took questions from journalists after the Fed announced it had raised interest rates another 25 bps. As expected, the assembled reporters were trying to ask questions which arranged words differently as they danced around the one central question of whether the Fed thought it was done raising rates and how it would make that dccision in the future. Powell parried the questions deftly and hewed to talking points about patience and observing data. Then I stopped because I figured my time was better spent elsewhere and that I'd be better off reading about it over the next week.

It seems to me that the Fed ought to be expanding its arsenal of tools by letting the world know that it could use open market activities to shrink its balance sheet more quickly. Right now it's just letting the $95 billion a month of bonds run off its book as it's doing now i.e. when bonds mature, it doesn't go out and buy more. This shrinks its balance sheet and tightens money supply. [ not tell the world that it also may start selling a certain amount of debt, say $50 billion or less monthly, out into the market? I think the very variability and uncertainty of this pronouncement could be healthy. When the market is overheated and excited (as it arguably is now), the Fed could sell more.

Another question: back during the height of the pandemic in 2020 in the United States we had, very surprisingly, a super high rate of business formation. What has happened to all those small businesses? How many still exist? Has the survival rate been higher or lower than normal? Of those that don't exist, what were their fates (collapse, acquisition by others or merger, IPO)?

Metrics

At dinner the other night with Crabes and Folds Robert was saying how his daughter was into the metrics and hustle aspects of her sales job. Upon reflection, I must admit that dig that stuff too. Hence my obsession with the wide array of numbers about which I've written over the years: grades, weight, gas mileage, number and regularity of blog posts... and most recently my rankings in the various leagues of Duolingo. 

Of course I know that it's all kind of stupid and bespeaks a focus on external rather than intrinsic aspects of my character, perhaps even a hole inside, but it does make getting through the work day and week easier if you have something to keep score of. That's all.

Old soles

Mary often criticizes me for having lots of shoes, especially athletic shoes. Which seems cruel and unusual. One would think it would be readily apparent why everyone needs not just soccer shoes, tennis shoes, hiking boots, running shoes, and so on, and sometimes multiple pairs of each (different ones may be optimal for walking, yardwork, going on the roof, etc.)

In the run up to our big trip to Europe for Sophia Konanc's wedding and then after I've been thinking seriously about the correct footwear portfolio for the trip. Do I need new walking sandals, for instance? There on the shelf in the mudroom my eye espied some old Keene water shoes that I hadn't worn for a while, so I decided to walk in them some to see if my feet could get accustomed to them. Yesterday I was out in Duke Forest for my third such test/reacquaintance walk. About two miles in my right foot seemed to be dragging in front, hitting gravel with each stride, which struck me as odd. Until I bent down and saw that the bottom sole of the sandal was flapping from a hinge a couple of inches back.

Being a couple of miles out on a very gravelly road, there was really nothing to be done, so I kept going. Five or ten minutes later I noticed some flapping in the rear of the left sandal. By the time I got back to Whitfield Rd, the outer soles of both shoes had come entirely off and I walked back to my car on the insoles.

I'm pretty sure they can be glued back on. The question is whether I should take them in to the shoe repair place and have them do it or should I try it myself. One issue with the former approach is how the woman behind the counter will shake her head at me and tell me it will cost $40 and do I really want to do that, with that "fool white people" look on her face. And then I have to decide whether I should take them on the trip. I guess if they fall apart they do sell footwear in Europe.

Taking it easy

As the effects of this mild concussion linger, I am respecting the advice of the medical profession and limiting both my screen time and those activities which require a lot of cognitive effort. Of course, after coming up on 19 years of continuous blogging, as many of you have probably come to expect, blogging is not a high cognitive load activity for the Grouse.

One thing that Great Doctor Internet agrees upon by now is that mild exercise actually benefits someone recovering from a concussion insofar as it stimulates blood flow to the old noggin. So I have gone out for short walks the last two days. 

Today took me to the trails around the public library. I have frankly not been a fan of the Town of Chapel Hill's tendency to sprinkle "art" throughout those woods: little quotes from poets, enormous musical instruments, etc. At times they have even elicited in me some affinity for the old saying "When I hear the word culture, that's when I reach for my revolver," which I always thought was a Joseph Goebbels quote but apparently deriving from some middling Nazi playwriter. In general I think that art whose primary patron is the State tends to be dreck, though obviously there are some exceptions.

At any rate, being in a mildly diminished cognitive state, I will confess that when I passed a quote from some poet on a waste-high plaque that was also rendered in braille, it did occur to me that for a blind person this was a rare treat indeed. And that kids on field trips would dig the big xylophones in the woods. As would their teachers, for 10-15 minutes at least. Until it was time to get back on the bus.

Remembering the joys of the pandemic

On the way in to work on Tuesday I rolled over a stupid little curb that the town of Chapel Hill, in its infinite wisdom, had put in place to protect pedestrians at an intersection where there are very few pedestrians. As if, if there were any, motorists would be unlikely to see them. What we are unlikely to see, it turns out, is this little curb itself when it is in shade on a bright summer's morn. So my noggin and back got a little jostled and I have ended up staying home and working mild days with the comfort of my own couch nearby, should I choose to make use of it. As I have at times. I've limited screen time and have begun listening to a novel (Deepti Kapoor's The Age of Vice) on my phone. It's fun, a sprawling Dickensian thing which really reminds us, as if we needed it, of the epic stretch and diversity of India as a place. It's a little overwrought, but none of us is perfect.

But the best thing about staying home has been settling back in to the rhythm of the work from home MO. It is definitely just more relaxed and there's something joyous about not having to get dressed and to fully managing not just my own time but my own space. I can control when the seltzer machine runs out of CO2 and also I am not tempted by all these extraneous snacks, all this food which my deeply embedded grad school money/calorie hoarding programming tells me I should eat because it is there and involves no additional expense.

Mysterious numbers

Upon launching my blog's homepage yesterday evening, I saw that I had had a burst of mysterious traffic yesterday: my most recent four posts had seen an atypical flurry of interest before the numbers trailed off to their normal pattern as I scrolled back through history. There was no easy way to figure out what had caused this. The tools for how pages are referred to the site are dubious at best. As are, for that matter, all traffic metrics. I used to have embedded code for statcounter.com which tracked by traffic, but when Google (parent of blogger/blogspot) started providing its own traffic numbers they scarcely correlated to those of Statcounter. At which point in time I threw up my hands and reminded myself that I'm not here for that anyway. If I really wanted traffic to my blog I'd put it under my own name and promote it consistently.

Yesterday evening after work Graham and I rode out to the Toyota dealership to pick up my Prius V. Last week a frightening array of lights had come on on my dash. Neither the hive mind of the internet nor Chat GPT could tell me what was going on, so I parked the car for a week while Auto Logic was closed for vacation the week of the 4th. When they came back in, I took it up to Carrboro and they told me my ABS system was shot and that it was normally a $3k thing but that my car, at 9 years of age and 94k miles, was still under warranty. Oh fraptious day! The dealer was able to take care of it pretty quickly once the parts came in.

But when I drove it off the lot yesterday evening I was a little sad to see that the car's on board computer had been effectively reset back to zero, the car's odometer miles were correct but that a lifetime of gas mileage data was gone. So I am now starting from zero. This will be interesting. This car's actual mileage (as calculated by dividing the miles on a tank by the number of gallons the pump tells me I just put into the car) has never matched what the on-board computer says it is. The computer always tacks on 3-4 mpg. Astute readers will recall how Hyundai was taken out back by the woodshed and beaten mercilessly by the regulators for this a few years back. Mighty Toyota escaped this fate. Now that Toyota is in the doghouse for its slowness in transitioning to pure electric vehicles it's gonna be interesting to see how it is treated going forward.

Squatting progress

Some years ago Ido Portal brought to my attention the importance of squatting (just body weight) as a basic physical capacity lacking in most of us office people who sit too much. I don't know which video it was that drew my attention, he's made an awful lot of them focused on the basic importance of squatting for humans and Westerners lack of ability to do it.

I started trying to work on my squatting back then, probably around 2013, but never really made much progress, primarily because of discomfort in my knees. Somewhere in there Mark dissuaded me from doing it, speculating that the stress on the joints could be excessive.

Recently I watched a video by another fitness guru woman on YouTube who is also a huge proponent of squatting. Since the exercise is actually kind of perfect for a somewhat lazy person and can be combined with things like toothbrushing, I decided to try to push through and develop my capacity. More recently I'm up to maybe 90-120 seconds max and have been mixing in squats throughout the day. It actually feels great, especially in my glutes and hips.

I'm also trying to incorporate more dead hanging, since many people out there tout its benefits and it looks pretty low risk and also has a staticness that appeals to my lazy side. I haven't been able to extend my hang time that far just yet but I'm working on it. Really I need to find a place to stick a bar in or around my house.

Attending to Leon

Somewhere in there it occurred to me that our shy cat Leon hadn't come and sat with me on the couch since I came back from Alaska. It so happens that this coincides with when I started to get sucked into practicing French on my phone.

Today I began rectifying this breach by consciously going back to Natalie's room where Leon largely spends his days and spending some quality time with him. He was very happy to have me come and pet him and remains as soft as ever. We'll see if this bears fruit in the weeks ahead.

Wrap up on Simenon, for now

Last weekend I read the third and last of the Maigret novels I had taken out of the library and will be giving Simenon a rest for now. I don't regret having read them but am happy for a break.

More than anything reading them reminded me of Boris Gasparov's reflection of the overuse of the conjunction "and" in early medieval Russian narrative prose, which I discussed here. Back in 12th or 13th century Russia the idea of the strict sequencing of narrative events was newish. In Simenon's world -- and especially in the last one I read, the 1952 Maigret and the Gangsters, it's the conventions of detective and suspense that seem altogether novel. The idea that gangsters would all have guns and be quite accustomed to using them seems so shocking to the Paris cops, they're almost beside themselves. So we have a sense of a genre emerging.

Which is a little odd given how much precedent there was, from Conan Doyle and Christie to the hardboiled genre. Chandler's novels were coming out at the same time. Maybe Simenon was just such a machine that he didn't have time to read much.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll pick one up here and there but I'm not altogether sold.

On Track

Z had to cancel our Wednesday tennis for dinner with his mom and family, if you can believe that shit. Which opened the door to my perhaps going to the Carolina Godiva Wednesday track meet, which I had been pondering. You should know, fair reader, that I gave it due consideration but decided I just wasn't quite ready to head out on a track on a Wednesday night in the heat with no preparation. One problem was the distances. This week they were running a 1500 and a 400 as well as some other things that didn't interest me. I'd like to get baseline times in each of those. Problem is, the 1500 would be first, so I'd be beat by the time I got to the 400. The alternate week they run a 200, an 800 and a mile, in that order which makes more sense to me.

But really the problem is that I don't belong on a track with no preparation whatsoever. So, this evening as I headed around the lake, I briefly considered tacking on the loop through Cedar Falls, which adds about a mile. Instead I decided to go up the track at Phillips and do some light intervals, some 100s, some 200s, just to remind me legs what it's like to sprint for longer than Adam makes me run on a tennis court.

This turned out OK. My legs got their little wake up calls but I had no cramping.

Maybe next time I'm free on a Wednesday I'll go to Godiva.

Game addiction and upselling

A couple of weeks back I mentioned I was getting sucked into the gamification features of Duolingo. That has only intensified with time. I just finished off a week at the top of the "Gold League" and was promoted to the "Sapphire League." Of course, all this means nothing to nobody but me, but I have been completly sucked into the competitive aspect of it. It was all I could do to stop myself last night from grinding another 30-40 minutes to get enough points to end up at #1, and honor which fell to one Jason Goggino, that lame-assed motherfucker.

I did get upsold to Super Duolingo, which is ad free. $7.95 a month, I think. Isn't everything these days? But I have resisted the temptation to buy "Timer Boosts" which would help me get more points and other bullshit. But I see how people could get drawn in.

One thing that does seem to be happening is that my French is getting refreshed. Soon I will start on Spanish so I'll be ready for that leg of me and Mary's upcoming trip. Probably I will eventually do the same with German and maybe even Serbo-Croatian. Or, perhaps, I will take up Ukrainian.

NIMBYism and Rule of law

In his overview of Maigret novels in some recent New Yorker, Adam Gopnik calls attention to the fact that Simenon shows now general doubt in the rectitude of the French state apparaturs: Maigret and his Paris police associates are agents and instruments of the French state and that's just fine. Nothing to see hear.

This weekend I'm reading the 1952 Maigret and the Gangsters and this mindset totally and everywhere in evidence. The cops are easily able to chase down some baddies by reviewing hotel registration cards. Maigret wants a wiretap on a phone and he just calls a switchboard and orders it up, no due process concerns whatsoever.

Now, the body of case law and constraints on state power which today mandate that to put a wiretap in place the cops need a court order and to get it they need decent evidence that wrongdoing is occurring to convince a generally skeptical judge, I'm willing to bet most of that came into being in the sixties and seventies in the USA, so what Maigret did in principal might have happened in the US.

More importantly, it made me realize that almost as a rule, in mystery novels, shows, movies, whatever, we don't give a fuck about due process ever. If the detective breaks into an apartment with no warrant and on the thinnest of pretexts, we really don't care. God forbid that our narrative consumption should be interrupted by a consideration of a suspect's rights.

I think that's probably true in life too. If you or your neighbor is a victim of a crime, you're not worried about due process. Get the motherfucker. No crime in my backyard. That due process stuff is for other people. 

Math hallucinations of Chat GPT

A client asked me yesterday to calculate the Net Present Value (NPV) of the alimony payments he owed to his wife. After reminding myself about the details of the NPV calculation, I realized he actually just needed a present value calculation rather then the more complex NPV one, since alimony payments are even and NPV is for uneven cashflows.

While I was trying to sort that stuff out my client had asked his question of Chat GPT, which had of course produced an answer. The problem is that the answer it produced, while sounding authoritative, actually made no sense whatsoever. I can't even figure out exactly what mistake it made to produce one component number of its bastard summation. What it did to was make me run the calculation first in Excel, then using my financial calculator, then using some online financial calculators, just to make sure that I wasn't screwed up in my thinking. And thus I squandered north of an hour of the work day, at the tail end of the day.

There were, no doubt, some beneficial sides to this whole interaction. I had to refamiliarize myself with some basic concepts and toolkits around the time value of money. I got this nice blog post. And my fear of the robots showing up to steal my livelihood, never a big concern, receded further into the rearview. But it was a pain in the ass.

*BTW, I put "Chat GPT math hallucination" into my preferred search engine and found this article which suggests that generative AIs are bullshitting rather than hallucinating. I think that's more or less right in this case. It just threw some math bullshit out there on the assumption that the reader was too stupid or lazy to do the math.

The Life Social

Yesterday Graham had plans to hang out with friends, but as of the day before they weren't firm. Just after breakfast (at noon) he appeared back in the living room dressed in his finest Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and multicolor socks with full on rooster hair. It seemed his friends had assembled earlier than expected and he was headed out.

We expected him home in a few hours. By 7:30, that seemed unlikely. I called to check status with him and asked if he would be home for dinner, to which he responded: "I don't think so. We're playing a game of Risk and I'm not losing." So there was that. At around 11 he texted to let me know he and his friends were at Shake Shack. I just confirmed with Mary that he was not home before she came to bed, which was "late," per her description.

Graham is still on track to work maybe a 60-hour summer. It would certainly be better if he worked more and fundamentally got drummed into his skull the idea of a tradeoff between work and spending money. He still continues to comfortably coast on the fact that 95% of the money ever given to him at any birthday or holiday is still in his bank account because he never went anywhere or spent on anything.

But it's awesome that he is out there spending time with other kids and forging relationships.That's something else he did too little of growing up. It's the most important thing I've ever done, both spending time with friends and developing to social skills to meet more people, and it doesn't come naturally to him.

I will say that I really hope he's not smoking weed and driving. It's not likely but not inconceivable. His attention issues are bad enough that he's already been in two accidents, one of which was clearly his fault.

 

Expanding networks and idea generation

With Adam out of town, I realized I needed to diversify my exercise portfolio, so I reached out to Daniel about walking. We did it this morning, setting out at around 9 from his place on the north side of the lake.

After a while the conversation wended its way around to the subject of meeting more people, seemingly random lunches and coffees, etc. He allowed that at the tender age of 61 or so, he was more or less done with meeting with no people for no particular purpose. On the one hand, I get it. At our age the novelty of that kind of encounter is pretty much played out and if it doesn't feel like it's worth the time, then fuck it.

On the other hand, there are relatively few ways for new ideas and new vectors to enter into our thought streams. We can read books and journalism, watch TV and movies, listen to music, etc. In an era of highly siloed lives which are further constrained by algorithms which replicate our innate tendencies to limit ourselves, the odds of seeing much that's novel is low. So there is some utility to meeting new people, even if they themselves tend to be more or less like us. At least they have independently firing brains and mouths, out of which something out of the ordinary might just issue.

Not long ago The Economist published an article about global demography which said, basically, that the long anticipated slowdown in global population growth was arriving sooner than anyone anticipated. The dancing numbers of Hans Rosling's TED talk all those years ago, which showed that as societies got richer, family sizes became smaller, were coming to pass sooner than expected. Which means that the world population was aging more quickly than expected. Which is not a bad thing from an ecological perspective but is not good from the perspective of innovation, since older people are poorer idea generators than younger people.

Which to me argues that we are better off fighting against our resistance to meeting new people as we age. If we don't meet more people, we doom ourselves to marinating in the same old ideas.

More on Simenon

As part of my not working on Saturdays program, I have instituted a proscription on all financial readings, which implied that this past Saturday I really shouldn't read my main current book, which tells the story of Steve Cohen of SAC Capital. So instead I took up the second of the three Maigret novels I had checked out from the library, the 1940 Maigret in Holland.

At the highest level, reading the Maigret novels really drives home how much change the last century has wrought in Europe. In this novel Maigret travels to Delfzijl in Northern Holland, where a Frenchman has been accused of murder. It is a primitive, basic place, where everyone clops about in sabots (wooden clogs -- the throwing of which into machines during the Industrial Revolution gave us the term saboteur) and eats very limited, traditional menus and drinks beer and schnappes. It is, in short, a very limited and elemental world.

Of course, it's no different than most places in America or anywhere outside of the great capitals. A ton has changed in the world very quickly. We just forget it very easily.

Trying to resist

As has been my want for some time, today I have endeavored to maintain a relatively disciplined shabbos. It has been about a month since I've had the option to do this at home, what with all the travel and the weekend before that a visit from our good friend David, who was in from Marin County.

As per usual I have a number of things on my task list, but I've worked hard not to look at it too much or take it particularly seriously. I have rather intentionally not read anything directly pertaining to finance or looked at any dollar figures, though one article in The Economist did kind of leap off the page at me. I have left it lying there on the counter in the bathroom. I will read it tomorrow.

After waking up on the late side I headed out for a bike ride in the late morning. Instead of going out Dairyland, as I've been doing a little too regularly this summer, I decided to head south towards Pittsboro on Farrington Mills Road, with the theoretical intent of wending my way as far as Aidan's Trading Post on Jones Ferry. My goal was to embrace the spirit of the summer of '20 with its very long rides with however many stops I needed to make for drinks and, when necessary and/or otherwise warranted, a snack. Unfortunately, first Farrington Mill and then, after a detour through Governor's Village, Farrington Pointe roads were closed on account of, most likely, trees down from the storm the night before. So I was shunted back along Carmel Church Road towards town. I didn't have the heart and stamina to make myself go out towards the country again and ended up clocking a meager 21 miles.