One of those flying dreams

The other night I had one of those dreams in which I was flying. Not in the old fashioned way, mind you. I wasn't drifting softly above the clouds looking down on all creation. In a typically modern, prosthetic fashion, I was on an airplane.

But not just any airplane, mind you. Mary and I were flying to Moscow. It seems I had some sort of entrepreneurial venture with which I was crazed and just knew that I could make a lot of money while there. On the plane, Mary informed me that she would be flying back to the states a few days early, much to my surprise and chagrin.

This was just a marvellous dream insofar as it combined elements of our current moment of Trump/Putin/Musk bromance (big profits!), season 2 of White Lotus (I will not drop a spoiler in there, if you get it, you get it), and a typical dissertation anxiety dream which takes me back to Moscow where I have a bad experience.

The dream was also informed by listening to the ex-of Princeton professor of Russian History Stephen Kotkin in conversation with Tyler Cowen on the latter's podcast. Kotkin was a little rude to me one time at the Exchange Pool in Princeton a couple of decades ago, but much of that was probably my acute desire for respect and acceptance from academics after quitting the field to support the family back then. On the podcast I was extremely impressed by Kotkin's prodigious work ethic and stamina across his academic career. I just added volume 1 of his Stalin bio to my book list. I also highly recommend Cowen's "Conversations with Tyler" podcast in general. The guy has really carved out a unique space for himself as a broad public intellectual. I think economists respect him too.

Stopping in to a Cafe

After going to my primary care provider for a measles titer -- just to be sure my immunity is good -- I decided to do something that flies in the face of canonical financial planner guidance. I stopped in to the Joe Van Gogh cafe on Weaver Dairy for a cup of coffee. -The coffee was, admittedly, a good deal better than the coffee available for free at my co-working space, but that's not why I was there. I went in there to run into somebody. Anybody.

Of late my days have become increasingly routinized and, unlike the early days of building my practice, I am not out in the community actively meeting people. This deprives me of what I once termed "oxygen," and I think that's as good a term as any for the charge one gets out of being out there and actively meeting more people. 

Today I thought at first it was going to be a wash. I had made my purchase and looked around the room and, while I saw lots of people who look like people I know, I didn't actually see anyone I knew. But then a woman walked in from the gym a couple of doors down and got in line. Mrs. Maitland (now Partin), who taught both Natalie and Graham in elementary school. I said hello, we exchanged quick life status updates about our kids, then went on about our days. No biggie, but lovely. Confirms the small town feel.

So I got what I paid for. Then I went to work.

AI headshot or not?

Not long ago some algorithm pitched me on a service to create an AI headshot of myself. All I needed to do was send in $49.95 plus maybe 10 pictures and it would create a number of variants of a headshot of me suitable for posting to my web site, LinkedIn, etc, wherever I hang my virtual shingle.

Seems like a pretty good deal, particularly if all the non co-located members of my team were to use the same vendor. We could produce the internally homogeneous shots that are the norm these days.

But then, I thought, what about the guy down the hall? There's a guy from Pittsboro who does head shots, videos, etc. From talking to him at lunch I happen to know he played soccer down there -- sounds like as an individual player he was more accomplished than I was but hadn't had the good fortune of being on a state championship team. He shares some medical challenges with my mom and has been through some tough moments. He has a young daughter and just yesterday I observed his wife over by the elevator and saw that she is, if I am not mistaken (one must be careful), expecting another. If I am willing to drive across town to buy my books at Flyleaf I really need to use this guy.

What are you against?

Someone out on Facebook recently asked, provocatively, something like "If you are against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which one are you against?" They really were hoping to call someone out so as to engender a good old-fashioned left-shaming pile-on where everybody demonstrated their perfect fealty to current progressive standards.

Upon reflection, here in the comfort of my own blog, I am prepared to say that the one that I think is the most problematic is Equity, particularly insofar as Equity forms the conceptual backstop for policy attempts to right historical wrongs. I think it is a concept and term that has been forcibly inserted into discourse too recently to form the basis of a lot of policy or hiring and it is therefore the thing that has pissed the most people off and caused the most blowback. 

Which isn't to say that I am not sympathetic to the goals of Equity as a pillar of policy. Our forebearers have done some fucked up shit (and each of us does too in the present, against our best efforts). The legacy of slavery (then lynching, segregation, red-lining) hangs heavily on American society and we struggle to figure out how best to address it. Debate continues as it should on how to rectify its legacy.

But what past wrongs need to be righted? I had buckteeth and was skinny as hell and was bullied as a child and had to overcome that. Beyond having my friends acknowledge they were mean to me (which they do) am I due anything from society? Absolutely not, though I am touched at progress made across generations to better address bullying in schools. What about rural whites who are victimized by the underfunding of their public schools (driven first and foremost by Republicans, to be sure) and decimated by opioid abuse caused, among other things, by rapacious pharmaceutical companies and overprescribing by a medical establishment, really a regulatory failure but also exacerbated by the challenges of keeping drugs from flowing across the border (mostly at monitored checkpoints, not carried by illegal immigrants)? Rural whites have been fucked in their own way, I could make decent argurments for hiring poorly qualified white people from rural backgrounds in the same way we prioritize hiring people of color. In fact, selective colleges and universities do seek geographical diversity that give some weight to kids who have overcome shitty schools in poor rural places, and I think that's a good thing. But I think that probably those admits probably fall under Diversity as much as Equity.

I am not entirely anti-Equity and I certainy wouldn't hesitate to patronize businesses that try to incorporate Equity into their hiring. But I think as a foundatoin for policy it is a little underarticulated and underdigested by the Body Politic, which explains much of the recent blowback. 

With all of that said, Equity is certainly a better principle for hiring than cronyism and blind loyalty to a leader. I'd much rather see an Equity tilt to hiring than someone like a Hegseth, Gabbard, RFK Jr, Patel etc. being in positions of power. But, for the record, I also think Lina Khan was probably too junior to be leading an organization the size of the FTC so I also think just being really smart and creative isn't necessrily the way to go when making cabinet-level hires. I think that some of the regulatory initiatives Khan drove explain why so much tech money lined up behind Trump this go round. Watching Ben Horowitz and Marc Andriessen's post election video really drove that home. (Although some of what they said in the video is just flat out wrong and dickheaded)

All She Was Worth

As I continue to grind forward with Japanese on DuoLingo, I decided to ping my friend Chris, who has been teaching Japanese literature at Michigan for a while now, for some kind of book that might help me me sort out issues both with how DuoLingo presents the language and with things that strike this anglophone person as odd. How interrogative and associative particles are used, etc. Chris suggested a book, and when I looked it up online, I saw that there was a mystery from the 1930s I had read by an author with the same last name (Kindaichi). "Oh yeah, Japanese mysteries, I always enjoy reading them," I thought.

So I went to the public library and picked up another novel by Kindaichi and, while I was there, used my preferred search engine to look up "Japanese mystery writers" and got a list. I picked up one by Miyuki Miyabe, the 1992 All She Was Worth, which won both Best Mystery Novel and Best Novel in Japan for the year, according to some prize-granting organization.

I was not sad to have picked it up. A good solid novel, about a widowed and injured detective out on leave after injuring his leg in an altercation with a perp, who gets dragged into investigating the disappearance of the young fiancee of a distant nephew, a banker and a bit of a dickhead. Before long, I found myself reading about the consumer credit crisis that happened in Japan in the 80s after the economoy experienced the turbocharged growth that led Japan, by 1989, to challenge the US for global economic supremacy, when the land under the Imperial Palace or somesuch in Tokyo was worth about as much as all of California. In fact, I found myself reading a bunch of technical finance stuff on a Saturday, technically violating my financial shabbos proscription against thinking about money on Saturday. I cut myself some slack because it was a novel, after all, and it was an accident.

I won't go deep into the plot so as not to spoil it for any random reader who happens upon this post. Reading this book helped me learn more about Japan while lying on a couch eating metaphorical bonbons, so it served its main purpose. Not much not to like.

A Sense of Where You Are

For some time John McPhee's first book, A Sense of Where You Are, had been sitting on my shelf, waiting for attention. The book focuses on Bill Bradley's time a Princeton, a time when Bradley put up some prodigious numbers (29.8 points per game over the course of his career) despite not being particularly big (6'5") or fast or high-jumping or anything. In the end I think this is kind of the underlying moral of the story: Bradley as the Great White Hope,* the exemplar of all that Anglo-American culture holds dear, in a sport that was rapidly being taken over by phenomena like Wilt Chamberlain (probably the most threatening of all), Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Cazzie Russell (a more dominant college than NBA player) and others. Though nowhere is this foregrounded or even, perhaps, foreminded by McPhee, who has offers nothing but praise or marvel for black players.

The hagiographical nature of this book shines through most clearly in one key dimension: it's just a crappy book (like so much hagiography). McPhee is overly gaga for Bradley** and he's just not much of a sportswriter. I was surprised to see that McPhee was already 34 when the book came out in 1965. I had always supposed that McPhee and Bradley were more or less contemporaries, but apparently that is not the case. Per Wikipedia McPhee started at Time magazine in 1963. I have to wonder what he was doing before that.

Not to rag on McPhee at all. It's remarkable to see that he's something of a late bloomer as a writer and, indeed, that his style matured and evolved pretty rapidly. The Headmaster, about the guy who ran Deerfield Academy, came out in '66, The Pine Barrens, about the region of New Jersey with the same name, was published in '68. Neither of those books feel as wooden as the Bill Bradley book. Tellingly, Levels of the Game, about a match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, saw the light of day in '69. Also not McPhee's best work, though at least the contrast between the two offers him something to chew on. Mostly, McPhee just hasn't found sports writing to be his truest metier. We are fortunate that he kept writing and blooming.

*BTW we obviously have never gotten away from the Great White Hope thing. Hence all the excitement for every John Stockton, Steve Nash, Luka Doncic, Cooper Flagg and even Jason Williams, Mac McClung and Jordan Kilganon that emerges from the great mosh pit of the balling world. White kids need to believe they have a chance. 

**I also am far from down on Bradley. Though I haven't studied his political career closely, I always thought he would have made a great President. But of course I do. I too am a pretty classic WASP Ivy Leaguer, if far from as accomplished as Bradley.

Waiting at Indian restaurant

On Friday evening we ordered dinner from a local Indian restaurant. It was supposed to be ready in 20 minutes, so I got there at about that time, only to have to wait another 25 before my order was ready. There was a big guy with a beard there whose order was also rather late. He was already modeling toxic male behavior so I tried to keep myself down as I waited but I did kinda nudge them when the order was 15 minutes late.

This is the third instance of this in the last six months or so. Once at Twisted Noodles, the night we needed to get Natalie to the airport after Christmas, I think. Another time at Cava right near our house.

Friday night a large part of it could have been that it was Valentine's Day and there were more people dining in there than I've seen in the past. But restaraunteurs should be anticipating that.

I was initially thinking that this might be a Trump 2.0 post-ICE raids labor availability issue but as I think back to the Twisted Noodles incident six weeks ago I'm less sure. Certainly labor availability is an issue, but housing affordability nearby might be as much of a driver of labor shortage as anything else. More and cheaper housing (which will necessitate some regulatory easing) plus a less nasty immigration policy would certainly help things.

All of which reminds me of the really shitty lecture we had at the Durham Orange Estate Planning Counsel Tuesday from a retired econ professor from NC State. I had always skipped this guy's talk in years past. Turns out, for good reason. He talked at a level that would slighly expand the knowledge of the average NPR listener, but which was totally inappropriate for a group of people working in and around finance. I really wanted to ask the guy to explain how the NAIRU (not accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) had slipped from 5.5-6% down to around 4% over a couple of decades, and in particular what the role of grey market employment (i.e. off the books illegal immigrants) was in this change, but he kept rambling past 1 pm and I had to get back to my desk and work, so I walked out. 

Near and far

Had some back and forth dialog with Mary's cousin Lee on Facebook. He's a born-again Christian, a Republican, he voted for Trump. He is also a good guy, reasonable to talk to, clearly very devoted to his family, who are also pleasant to meet, and was a consummate host for our family when we visited with them in Haines, Alaska a couple of summers ago, and again when Mary went back that September to take pictures using her big girl camera.* 

I'm glad Lee and I can have calm dialogue about things. It helps of course that we're both white males, so nothing really threatens us, whine as some might. But I'm not entirely clear in my mind as to why I should necessarily prefer affiliation and alignment with Lee as opposed, say, to being on the same page with someone like Sarah, the young English girl I innocently kissed in the summer of 1981 near Manchester who now has a beautiful cheese farm in Galicia, Spain. Or people I know from Moscow who suffer under Putin. Or the people around the world who host Noraly so graciously as she rides through their towns on Itchy Boots.

America is ultimately held together by nothing so much as a set of ideas, and our notions of what those ideas are have diverged a lot internally. Meanwhile, I agree with a lot of people who live elsewhere on things more than I agree with Lee.

As to America's greatness, so much of our idea of our notional greatness goes back to WWII, which we perceive ourselves as having "won" with our derring do and bravery. It must be so. We've seen so many movies about it.

Sarah Paine of the US Naval War College scoffs at this notion. For the Nazis, she points out, Russia was the primary adversary and also the primary theater in which military engagement happened. And Germans died. Something like 20-27 million Soviet citizens died in WWII, compared to maybe 420,000 Americans. Had the Nazis not been tied up in Russia, Paine notes, we'd have never progressed from Normandy towards Berlin. If, indeed, we had even made it onshore. So in many ways the origin myth of American greatness, the winning of the war, is grossly exaggerated.

Pondering all this.

* Natalie, Graham and I might have ripped her limb from limb had she tried to take those pictures while we were there. As a sign of our love.

The Mag 7 as a destroyers

It was 2011 when Marc Andriessen -- the brains behind Netscape, now a founder of VC firm Andriessen Horowitz (AKA A16z) said that "software will eat the world." Somewhere in the last couple of years Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group started talking about the mega technology firms, now christened the "Magnificent 7," as political powers in their own right, having more power in fact than most smaller nations. It was a prescient observation. The hosts on the Acquired podcast like to gush about software as the greatest business model of all time because the marginal costs on it are so low: once it is created, the cost to manufacture and distribute another unit of it barely exist.

Now here we are. The PayPal Mafia (including Thiel, Musk and David Sacks, the "crypto Czar") has effectively staged a coup. The richest man in world history (in absulute dollar if not relative terms -- but he may be the latter also) is running amok throughout the Federal government, an entity charged with effecting public goods, with a bunch juvenile jack-booted laptop wielders with minimal controls around them.

I've been enjoying listening to the podcast of Dwarkesh Patel, including most recently a series of lectures by Sarah Paine of the US Naval War Colege, a refreshingly old school intellectual corrective to his at times tech addled mind. But I was a little shocked when Patel, in a short ad he's been running announcing a couple of roles for which he's hiring, has referred to the people at the WaPo, CNN, etc. as "mediocre." OK. Fine, they're not all rocket scientists. But do we really want the world to be run by an ever smaller set of geniuses? For my money, we don't. I'd rather see a broader set of decent people slogging together towards a diversified set of aims on which they've all muddled towards consensus, a world in which more of them can go to sleep feeling and knowing they've contributed, hoping their children can do the same in the future.

Pilot flirting with grad student at JFK

At JFK yesterday I was blessed to observe and overhear a classic conversation. There was a UNC graduate student, 28-30ish tall, pretty, tattoo on her arm, Doc Maartens -- who was being chatted up by a pilot who was probably late 40s-early 50s. He was talking about 90% of the time, pretty excitedly. Having set the stage, I'll just convey a few snippets which should 

"If I had been smart enough to go to UNC graduate school in English..."

"How did you get to be such a good student?"

"...I fly an Airbus 320 for JetBlue."

And so on. You get the picture.

It took me back to the classic scene from Moonstruck (I have blogged about it before)-- which in memory still sits high in my pantheon of the greatest movies of all time, meaning I need to see it again. With her philandering husband out somewhere with his younger girlfrient, Olympia Dukakis dresses up nice and goes to a restaurant. A guy about her age who looks like but is not Buck Henry asks if he can join her. Turns out he's an NYU professor who has fucked up his life sleeping with students. So she asks him, "Why do men chase younger women?" After a brief pause, perhaps a hem or a haw, he responds "Becuase they fear death."

Bingo. Wiser words were never spoken. Which implies that the secret to a stable marriage is to participate in the cycle of life fully -- raising children, attending weddings and funerals, mentoring others, owning pets, reading history books, advocating for good governance -- so as to fear death less.

Gone soft

I've been out and about in the streets of New York the last couple of days seeing clients and friends. It hasn't been that cold (35-40ish), but I have been cold. Partially it's down to wind. Mostly it's because I've grown soft over years of being in the south.

Moreover, I've become used to being in private more. There's a buzz to being out in public and on the streets and all of that, but my time for really embracing it has largely past. At the end of each time out in the streets I've been all too happy to retreat to the comfort of my small but cozy hotel room.

Tonight, dinner with Natalie. Followed by seeing more friends and some art with Natalie tomorrow. And her new pad in Brooklyn. Then home. That will be plenty.

Silikonnacht

In general one should be hesitant to draw parallels to Nazism. Right now I'm not sure hesitancy is in order.

The playbook Musk and Trump are running are running at USAID and with the government payments system are the same one Musk used at a data center near Sacramento when he wanted to move some servers from there to Seattle (Twitter servers?), as Isaacson documents in his bio of Musk. He showed up at the door, demanded to be let in, wouldn't take no for an answer. When he was told there were best practices for doing it for data security, he said fuck you we're renting some trucks and wrapping the servers in blankets. He did it. It turned out OK but he just ran over people.

In that case, he owned the company. In this case, he does not. What's worse, we're talking about a man who has had a number of untranscribed private calls with Putin and has been engaging in his own selective foreign policy granting and denying access to Starlink and advocating for neo-Fascists like AFD in Germany. What's going on right now is flat the fuck out crazy and should worry everyone.

Lonely kid with a frisbee

I've spent a good chunk of the afternoon here on the couch looking out at the lake, an hour or so just now talking to my sister. Prior to our call and still now as I write, there's a boy out in the lake parking lot with a frisbee. He looks to be 6th-7th grade or so. He throws the frisbee across the parking lot and then runs over and gets it. He spent a little time practicing some fakes like one sees in ultimate games. I'm guessing he plays ultimate.

For a little while someone with grey hair, probably his grandfather, came out and threw with him. Thinking through it logically, it was probably the cardiologist Chuck, who is married to Lynn, and this is his grandkid. But that guy took off pretty quickly.

Which brings us to the true topic of this post, which is the greying of our neighborhood and what a shame that is. It's not that the neighborhood lacks entirely for children, far from it. There are kids around. But there are a lot of folx like us too, people who have raised kids but who are in absolutely no rush to give up our houses. I've even had conversations with a very smart guy who lives down the way about trying to cobbling together a set of service providers (cleaners, repair people, caterers, medical staff, memory care, etc.) who could come around to houses in the neighborhood and provide us with a level of service analogous to what one could get in a residential CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community). I told him I was sure lots of people were having the same thought and were trying to do something similar but that I doubted the economies of scale would ever make it feasible.

There's enough of a decrease of kid density on this side of Chapel Hill that the town government -- when doing strategic planning for the school system -- has at least tossed out there the idea of shutting down my kids' elementary school (the oldest school in town) and razing it to build affordable housing for teachers there. Sad to say, it makes sesne. 

In any case, the kid out in the parking lot continues to wing the thing across the way and then run after it. I give him all the props in the world. If my shoulder wasn't feeling a little wonky I might go out there and toss with him, but I have doubles in the morning so must conserve my strength.