The First Deadly Sin

Really since the beginning of the pandemic I haven't getting out much and meeting and seeing new people, something I used to do in the early phases of my practice and, though it's very hard to draw a straight line between all this "networking" and my practice, certainly I met a lot of people and learned an awful lot about a lot of things, including the strengths of the local universities, economic development, and entrepreneurship. All in all it's been a positive thing.

So when Nathan mentioned that he was going to some thing at Duke about technology transfer (from academia to private sector), I saw no good reason not to go. With the exception of other work I could be doing. In the end, I went.

Being a little rusty and off the circuit, I didn't know that many people and my ability to bullshit about science, which I had honed a little during my years when our office was at the NC Biotech Center, had declined precipitously. Also, I just didn't care much. So, after chatting for a while with my former neighbor Mary Beth (lovely to see her) and catching up on one another's kids, I made my way over to the food table. It's not that I was that hungry, mind you, it's just that the pull of free food honed over many years in a doctoral program in the humanities exerted and irresistible pull on me.

I had seen people wandering around the floor with these little slider-looking thingies and when I approached the table I saw that they contained brisket, so I put a couple of those on a plate and some funky fall-themed ravioli. I was making my way around the table to where the salads were (I promise I was) and I decided to take an investigatory bite of one of the sliders to assess its merits. But when I bit down, there was sharp and piercing pain in one of my front incisors.

Upon closer inspection, there was a sturdy plastic toothpick (verily, the work of Lucifer himself) which my jaws, which are after all some of the body's strongest muscles ounce for ounce, had driven into the area around my lower incisors, already a tad precarious. Just then I saw Mary Beth's husband Dennis standing there and had to go say hello, though my teeth were writhing in pain and it kind of felt like I had dislodged one. He and I caught up while in my mind I'm standing there going what the fuck is up with my mouth. I made my way to the bathroom as quickly as I could. There was nothing visibly amiss but man, was there pain. And my bite was different.

After a dinner of cheese grits and the very last of the Thanksgiving stuffing this morning my mouth is decidedly less bad but not altogether good. I will stick with soft food for the day. Clearly the Lord hat smited me for my gluttony, and I do sincerely repent. It makes me want to revisit Wittgenstein's reflections on the topic of toothache which I think made it all the way into the Philosophical Investigations though they may have been relegated to the notebooks which became Culture and Value or perhaps the lectures distilled into the Blue and Brown books. It should also, obviously, temper the rapacity with which I attack buffet spreads in the future.

Routines nearing 60

Over the weekend there was a story in the Journal about some guy who turned 60 and went about doing a bunch of novel things to mix things up out of a fear that he had become too boring. I am not quite 60, but it's true that I am now closer to 60 than I am even to 55 so it was worth pondering. 

Part of the guy's concern was that he was so set in his routines that he didn't even have any fresh stories to tell. On the one hand, I can see that. On the other, I'm not a freaking entertainer over here. My kids seem to love me. I do OK with my friends just by staying consistent in calling and showing up. My cats like it when I pet them.

At the same time I do know that keeping some diversity of experience rolling through the old noggin benefits me so it can only benefit my self-presentation, my "product," as it were. The rump shaker, the money maker. How to arrive at adequate, appropriate, and carbon-lite diversification of experience? Working on it.

Notes in passing

Moving books from upstairs to downstairs -- and from Natalie's overburdened IKEA Billy shelf -- to populate our new built in shelves downstairs. It's noteworthy that all of our "pocket paperbacks" are several decades old. They seem to neither print nor sell many of these in the places we shop. You have to wonder if these very small paperbacks used to be marketable because the median age was lower back in the 70s-80s. Now that the average age has trended up the small fonts and tight leading don't fit people's reading habit.

****

On the theme of just reading rather than worrying too much about what I'm specifically reading, I started reading a New Yorker profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian from a July issue. Turns out the guy basically fell into art by accident. It was just the first thing he found to sell and he made money at it so he kept going. Now he rules the art world from almost twenty galleries spread across continents. If there were any doubts that markets ruled high as well as middle and low culture, let them be summarily dispelled. Yet another reason to not live in New York or LA or San Francisco etc. in a place where people get entirely caught up in jockeying for cultural prestige. Chapel Hill is surely bad enough.

****

Should probably get Graham out to practice parallel parking. It's good just to get him behind the wheel and the Subaru needs exercise.

No so effective altruism

The concept of effective altruism as apparently espoused in and around Silicon Valley is, in my limited understanding, deeply and tragically flawed and indeed sums up much of the worst features of a system of remedying public goods through private means. At root, the core of effective altruism seems to be people out making as much money as they can to give it away to solve the world's problems. Sounds nice.

Except when you say "make as much money as possible" in a world in which seven companies control about 30% of the market cap of the S&P 500, or about $11.5 trillion, which to give a sense of scale is about 45% of US 2022 GDP, this creates real problems. Basically what it boils down to is a lot of techbros -- the same community lets not forget that also espouses the merits of micro-dosing LSD to improve productivity -- getting outsized sway over how to fund the achievement of public goods. With zero oversight. Who voted for these guys? Why should they determine what society's problems are that need to be addressed? These are some general lines of critique I've seen advanced against philanthropy in general, but it's much worse when it's techbros in charge because in general they spend so much time alone and not out in the world seeing people and their problems. I guess the same is true for all of us in a work from home and let Amazon deliver it world, but at least I am conscious of it as a huge gap. Maybe they are too but I'm not hearing it from them.

Also, the idea that AI is going to create a great deal of abundance that does away with human need is just hogwash. There's a basic human need to feel that you are producing, contributing, that you're part of the web of being. If AI is just figuring everything out for us and delivering AI-baked pizzas using AI-flown drones to our homes built by AI-robots so we can all play pickleball, people will feel like shit because they didn't do anything useful that day.

Lost Girls

At bedtime last night I reached around the filing cabinet temporarily (due to some closets Bobby and Julie's boy Thomas is building for us) in front of my the IKEA Billy bookshelf that houses my shelf of books that are not yet read but may get read in the next year or two. I couldn't see what I was grabbing but in my mind I was looking for the next Elizabeth George novel in the Inspector Lynley series.

Instead my hand alighted upon the 2013 Lost Girls by Robert Kolker, the story of the Gilgo Beach murders, a recent addition. So I started reading it. Really good. Thus far he is setting the stage by telling the backstories of the murder victims, each of whom thus far come from hardscrabble backgrounds from small towns and cities around the Northeast. All of them from broken homes, not a stable family situation in sight. Multigenerational broken homes, with worthless fathers drifting in and out for cameos and moms and grandmothers who themselves struggle to keep it together. So many sibblings that it's a blur of names, as impossible to keep track of who is who as people always say Russian novels are.

An America that is, by some miraculous stroke of infinite good luck, largely foreign to me. The state, in the form of schools, foster care systems, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, drifts around the margins of the narrative, sometimes disdained by the families out of pride, sometimes eagerly invoked.

I'll keep reading.  

BOGO with a twist

Interesting article today in the Journal about the evolution of "Buy One Get One free" or "BOGO" offers from places like Dominos, Starbucks, etc. It seems that the new thing is to link BOGO offers to clearing some other hurdle like signing up for a rewards program or coming back in to the store a second time so as to separate out the "price-insensitive" customers who are less likely to be influenced by a BOGO offer. This lets you collect more data about these customers Which makes a little bit of sense when you think about it for a second.

But then when you stop to think about it for more than a second, it is pretty counterintuitive. Why do you want to get all this data on your less affluent customers and exclude the more affluent ones? Contrast this with Costco's longtime strategy of locating stores in more affluent areas, which allows Costco to have a super-affluent client base, albeit a bargain-thirsty one.

Then again, what do I know?

The Spider Network

As a weekday bedtime book -- a slot into which I sometimes insert a narrative finance book out of an attempt at ongoing professionalism -- I've been reading The Spider Network by David Enrich, the finance editor of the New York Times. Detailing the story of the LIBOR-fixing scandals of that followed pretty hard on the heels of the financial crisis, it's a good not great book.

For starters lets focus on its strengths. First off, it exists. There are a couple of other books about the scandals, one by one of the traders involved in it, the other seemingly by someone at Bloomberg, but that's it. When it was all going down back in the early 2010s, the LIBOR scandals were a big deal. But the whole thing was so deep in the belly of the banks that it was hard for non-finance people to grasp how it impacted them. 

The book is appropriately clear on the extent to which Tom Hayes was scapegoated and had the book thrown at him because some banker had to be shown to pay not just for LIBOR but also for the earlier unattoned sins from the financial crisis proper, after which no major bank employee get sent to jail. A head needed to roll, and it ended up being Tom Hayes. The guy was guilty as shit, no question there, but so were a lot of other people and they all walked.

In general there is too much detail in this book. It could have clocked in closer to 300 pages and covered the topic, but for some reason Enrich kept wanting to hover over the same land, like a slow moving hurricane near Houston.

Most importantly, and most interestingly, the book doesn't really touch the question of how much the scandals actually costed the many people downstream from it: first and foremost mortgage-holder. If traders all across Wall Street and its global extensions were continually exerting pressure to drag LIBOR this way and that for the benefit of their own trades, it's highly likely that in the end the impact netted out to nothing. After all, they were continually taking both sides of the trades. Unfortunately this is an entirely unprovable and unfalsifiable hypothesis. But it's quite possible it never really mattered to your average mortgage-holder. But they were a bunch of crooks and more of them should have answered for it.

The Spider Network marks, sadly, the last of the tomes of popular finance writings that came to me from the shelves of George Berridge, Jr after he passed earlier this year. Maybe Rob has a few more, but I doubt it. I still have a number of such books, admittedly, from George Sr. But they are older and written in the more stilted idiom of the 60s-80s. But maybe it's time I dug into them

Power Failure

The day before yesterday I finished listening to William Cohan's Power Failure in the car. Clocking in at over 28 hours long (I'm kind of surprised I made it through), Cohan retells the story of GE, and particularly more recent GE, first first in ascendancy under Jack Welch, then in slow decline under Jeffrey Immelt and his successors. 

Under Welch, of course, GE was corporate America's golden child, the company that could do no wrong. Then Immelt came in and first some of the sheen came off, then the financial crisis hit and shook GE's finance-heavy business model, then Immelt just continued to plain old fuck shit up.

Right now there is a sense in the markets that the Magnificent 7 (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Facebook, Tesla and Amazon) can do no wrong and will continue to dominate the universe of into the foreseeable future. How quickly we forget how power shifts in markets and everything comes to an end. Before the financial crisis it was all about Wall Street, then they fell. In the 60s it was the Nifty Fifty. Walmart had its day in the sun, as did Exxon. Even Enron once looked invincible.

For Big Tech to maintain its dominance forever, its masters will have needed to perfect the art of management so as not to be derailed by hubris and the errors in judgment that inevitably trail behind that sense of inevitability that surrounds them now. If we need any indication of the corruptibility of Big Tech, just gaze for a moment on this picture of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, the woman for whom he left Mackenzie Scott. Say no more.

The Children of Dynmouth

Some years ago I picked up a copy of William Trevor's Selected Stories. There must have been a glowing review somewhere, and with good reason. Since then I have been slowly working my way through the book, often reading a story or two between other books and have fallen deeply in love with Trevor and his Vermeer-like character sketches.

As I've made my way towards the end of that volume I wondered if he could keep it up at novel length or if he was (like Chekhov) really best suited for the short story. So I got my hands on a copy of the 1976 The Children of Dynmouth, which somehow struck me as a good place to start.

My instinct was rewarded. It's a wonderful little book about a small British town, about secrets, interdependency, humans. About the role of the narrator.

It made me think how it would be wonderful to reach a course called something like "Some Novels" which would not start with a reading list but would have the students and professor bring ideas into the class, jointly agree upon a list, and then read the novels together. Maybe with temporal or geographic constraints on it like "Some Post-WWII European Novels" or "Some 20th Century Asian Novels." It would be a great exercise.  

The most important things

Sam Altman -- who was the CEO of OpenAI at the time before his recent unceremonial defenestration -- said this recently in an interview with the Wall Street Journal (10/24/23 print edition, online reads slightly different): "The two things that will matter most over the next decade or few decades to improving the human condition are abundant and inexpensive intelligence: the more powerful, the more general, the smarter the better."

I disagree. We aren't going to be able to smart our way out of our various current predicaments. Honestly there are plenty of intelligent people around and if smarts were the issue, we'd be just fine. 

For humanity to survive and thrive more of us need to be rowing in the same direction more consistently and acting in a manner that is aligned with what we say we want. Which means we need good leadership and also good listening all up and down society. We can't be sitting around waiting for the next Obama to come inspire us with stunning oratory. Though a few of them wouldn't hurt. Getting our shit together will not ultimately be an intellectual act but a matter of spirit, will and reshaping our notion of what a/the good life is.

A nearly perfect weekend

After a fairly exhausting trip to New York we had a pretty perfect weekend here at the house. I went to my meeting first thing Saturday morning but otherwise didn't leave the house. Instead, Mary and I worked around the house getting ready for this morning's expected arrival of Bobby and Julie's boy Thomas to put in these long-delayed closets upstairs. We moved a bunch of stuff around and also got rid of some. Could have been more, but some. Then I got up on the roof and got the season's first tranche of leaves down.

Through all of this, we argued not a whit.

Graham was almost stranded in Charlottesville when his ride lost his keys but they figured it out. A locksmith showed up and got him a new fob then and there. Didn't know that could be done.

Finally booked my ticket for Colorado in January.

Gotta go get ready for the day.

ps. Later in the day I learned that I had missed Amy's Barbie movie party out at the Farmhouse. Bummer. 

Rolled up

My newspaper did not arrive at the top of my driveway this morning. I hope that Monica, who delivers it, is doing OK. She has had a hard few last years, wrestling with cancer herself after losing a sister to it and a brother to either it or something else. To top it off, her mom passed away recently, having lived a pretty full life.

On Friday I had lunch with Alberto, an old friend from Yale. He had been a Poli Sci grad student there but deigned to hang out and party with some of us younger folx. He hails from Guatemala but has had a pretty global life and splits time now between Rome and Brooklyn. We were talking about the state of the world and politics and US vs Europe in terms of the fabric of life, pluses and minuses. The things one talks about. I broached my thesis that one of the underdiscussed and perhaps underappreciated factors in the emptying of the countryside and the rise of populism everywhere has been the rise of corporatism in almost everything and the way that has made it so difficult to be a small businessperson in the country.

Far from disagreeing, Alberto said that he thought it wasn't a phenomenon unique to the country but was equally true of the city. That the city was increasingly hollowed out and wiped clean of businesses run by small proprietors in favor of chains.

I can totally see this, and how sad it is to see the Jane Jacobs idyll of the urban neighborhood get scrubbed out. There is a simple capital maintenance aspect to it, which is illuminated by some recent dynamics on the main block of Franklin St here in Chapel Hill. The old Spanky's space got taken over by the chicken tenders and fries chain Raising Cane because the 1910s era building needed a lot of upfitting (probably to come up to code) and only a chain had deep enough pockets to undertake the work and have the patience for it to pay out. The building had been owned by the 411 Restaurant Group since the 70s and had likely been able to take advantage of some grandfathering of compliance (bringing bathrooms up to ADA standards, for instance). Meanwhile, down the block, Linda's struggles to raise enough money to do some upgrades and has started a GoFundMe to fill some of the gaps. So there is a regulatory component to this too. Higher compliance costs make it harder for small businesses to compete.

Five or six years back I had coffee in NYC with Katja, whom I had met in '95-96 when she came to Columbia on a Fulbright. A Kievan Jew, she want to college in Tartu, Estonia and then grad school in Moscow. When I was there for my dissertation in 97-98, we hung out, including a memorable excursion up the Moscow River to some island where Mary and I had to take separate boats because of the crush of people boarding and Katja took care of Mary while I waited with Kirill for the next boat. Katja eventually married a nice German guy, moved to Berlin, won a major prize for her first novel written in German and then moved to Tbilisi. At least until Putin invaded, it all seemed pretty glamorous to me. But when I told her I lived in my hometown and hung out with people i had known since I was a small child, she was incredibly jealous. And it's true, I'm incredibly fortunate to live in a place where it's still possible to have these kinds of relationships. Even though the inexorable rise of chains (and the cost of real estate) even here in Chapel Hill makes them harder to imagine going forward.

A new view of "The City"

Just back from a quick 2-day hop to New York, which marked a milestone for me. For the first time ever, my trip did not see me step foot once in Manhattan, above ground at least, because on Thursday I did have to change from the N to the 4 at Lexington Ave. I stayed in Queens at Beth's house and visited exclusively with clients, prospects and friends in Brooklyn. I even spent a good chunk of the afternoon at a branch of our co-working space on Park Slope.

The gentrified parts of Brooklyn, of course, feel very much like the Manhattan of my youth, if in fact a shiner, better appointed version thereof. A couple of clients as well as my co-working space were right near the intersection of Flatbush and Bergen where Hilary and Mattie lived back in '86. The place is literally unrecognizable, the Barclay's Center having arrived like a meteor in the heart of the neighborhood. 

Yesterday after a lunch in what I think was Fort Greene I took the G train from Brooklyn to Queens without even bothering to pass through Manhattan underground. That was novel and kind of liberating.

Walking down Atlantic Avenue I passed the first ever Removery I've seen, a business dedicated to the removal of tattoos. Not surprisingly it is a chain. There are a number of them already in NC, maybe 150 of them nationwide. I was surprised to learn that Removery features partnerships with tattoo artists, offering to remove their tattoos for free. I can't quite figure out if that's because people clients come to tattoo artists feeling remorseful or because they want to remove old ink so they can put something new on their body. Whatever. Removery has, I think, a lot of potential. I wouldn't be surprised to see an IPO somewhere in there, because it does not yet seem to be a franchising opportunity. One path or the other, if not both, will make sense as it expands.

Dust

Late in the day yesterday I got an email from Frank in Princeton saying that the wife of someone we knew had passed away after a long struggle with early onset Alzheimer's. She may have been 5-7 years older than me, but not much more than that. I remember running into her in the thrift store down the alley off Nassau not far from where we lived. I think she was a little embarrassed to be seen there but I sure wasn't. I have a jacket in my closet right now from that thrift store -- the jacket I wore pretty much every other day the first quarter of 2008 when I was working at Goldman Sachs as the financial crisis was raining down upon us. I also got one of my absolute favorite garments of all time there, a super-soft lightweight flannel that passed as a work shirt and that I also sported to 85 Broad that winter, feeling a little mischievous as I did so (which should give you some idea of how lame WASPs are).

But I digress. She died. I guess I should say her name, Joyce, married to Alex, so that if I see this post in a decade or so I'll remember who I was talking about.

I commented to Mary that it was perhaps a blessing, and Mary said no it wasn't and she hates it when people say that. But Mary has never watched a family member have Alzheimer's or dementia for a long time. All of her family have been entirely with us until they passed, which has been truly a blessing.

Rare animation

I got a text yesterday evening from one of the candidates in today's municipal election asking about a neighbor of mine. It seems the candidate's daughter -- a fifth grader -- had been verbally assaulted in class by the son of my neighbor -- apparently a fervent supporter of the opposing candidate. So her daughter came home in tears. I gave the candidate my neighbor's email but not her cell phone.

It will be good when this election is over. Things are a little crazy out there. I certainly hope that the candidates I'm supporting win but honestly Putin is not going to drop a nuclear bomb if the election goes the other way. And China will not move on Taiwan.

Big Man

I met the founder of one of the big dotcom era services -- whom we shall call "L" -- at a networking thing, where he was "pitching his new deal," as they say. I had heard L might have an interest in a technology a friend has, so I went to thumbnail it to him and get his card.

I described it: "You know, I invented that" L says to me.
Me: "Yeah yeah, but he's got a fresh wrinkle, he'll tell you more about it."

So I get L's card and hang out there listening to him talk. Nice guy. Good looking. Younger than you would think. Near mullet. Big lapels.

And then he goes, in the context of something else: "I know the 3 richest people in China and the richest Chinese person in America." Which is odd, that he should say that.. We know the guy's rich. Why the need to brag and compete with people clearly less rich than him. Maybe he's saying he's got access and could help with "deals," dunno. Or maybe to be that successful you've got to just want to compete and demonstrate all the time.

Or maybe we all posture and name drop a little to bolster ourselves, and it just comes out more strikingly when the names are big. For instance, me telling this story here. I know L

*BTW -- this was an old post from 2007 that I had unpublished for some reason, judging by the old comments. This was Sean Parker of Napster, for those of you with memories going that far back.

A random grahamism

Something Graham thought when he was a child: men die younger because they get grey hair and women don't.

BTW, this was sitting around as a draft for years. I'm glad I kept it and came back to review it. One of the original premises of the blog was to keep track of funny things the kids did and said at some point in time so we could come back to them in the future.

Come to think of it, here's one from this week. Graham voted in Chapel Hill's municipal elections on Tuesday. I am pretty sure he had the good sense to vote for Jess Anderson and a smattering of the candidates for Town Council who aren't part of Adam Searing's block, though I stop short of asking him directly because after all it is America and he deserves the sanctity of the voting booth.

Graham did say that Adam Searing was at the polling place when he went there on Tuesday and that he said hello and told Adam he had been unable to attend an information session Adam and cronies had done near our house because of a very bad sore throat. Bravo.

Roadside Library

Back in 2013 I drove north in August to New York without the family. I honestly can't remember why that was the case. Northwest of Clarksville, VA I passed a charming little library in what looks to have once been an old country store. The Wylliesburg Public Library. Some of you may remember reading about it here. On the way back from where I was west of Richmond yesterday I decided to blow off the 95/85 corridor once more and realized I'd be going past there again, so I decided to stop and investigate.

The library was closed when I got there. It is usually open M, W, F 9-5 and Saturday 9-12. If I had to bet I would wager that books on the LGBTQ experience are dramatically underrepresented, but I really don't care. I really like the fact that this library exists and that there's a place for rural folks and kids to come and borrow books. If I could figure out how I would donate some money.

From the mean streets of Clark Hills

Last night, for the second year in a row, instead of waiting with baited breath in our respective homes for hordes trick or treaters we knew would not come, we all gathered in the Sherman-Jollis driveway next door for an outdoor fire, chili, snacks and baked goods. I made a cornbread in a big old cast iron pan, which has become surprisingly easy now that I've done it a few times.

At its peak last night there were about fourteen of us, almost all empty nesters plus Dylan and Christine, the younger couple across the street who either haven't gotten around to having kids or for some reason decided not to. For all of our sakes over the long run, I hope they change their mind. Over the short run too, it's nice to see kids around.

At a federal and state level, it would be better to see more kids, because they'll be growing up and paying into Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes as we age and need benefits. The local school system, of course, is all too happy for us to stick around paying high property taxes but not sending kids to school, which costs money.

But why am I going off on money all the time. Last night we saw all of one trick or treater. One. All night. Yes it is hilly and yes the lots are large, so kids theoretically need to work hard to get any candy. But in fact that one kid could have just taken our bowls of candy, dumped it in his plastic pumpkin and called it a night. One trick or treater is a new all time low.

But we had a great time sitting around the fire, telling stories about old neighbors, their pets, storms of yore, growing up. The last five of us finally went home around 10:30.