This is Africa

Somewhere in Season 7 of Itchy Boots, as our blonde, blue-eyed heroine Noraly travels through East Africa on her motorcycle, along endless roads of red clay often made virtually impassable during the rainy season, she finds herself stuck on the side of the road in the rain as night closes in. Also, her phone is running low on power. 

The next day she reports back to her viewers what happened. Someone came along and towed her to the next village or back to the one she had just passed. She slept and ate something. Eventually her mechanical issues get sorted out. "I wasn't really worried," she tells us, "after all, this is Africa, they're not going to just leave you there by the side of the road." Or something like that. And, indeed, this was her experience. Whenever she has problems, and it happens not infrequently: most often her bike getting stuck in the mud, mechanical this or that, someone stops and offers to help and than does. Yeah she probably pays them, and yeah she's a YouTuber with a few million subscribers who may well be well known in odd corners of the world where she goes but very few other tourists else do, but still. She has faith in human nature and humans come through.

This is what we must try to distill, then bottle, then communicate to each other and, crucially, to the AIs. A willingness to consistently step in and save one another at whatever cost to ourselves. This is Africa.

Then again, I thought back to Jim Lewis' recent post about visiting with a murderous, drug-addled gang of teenage boys who terrorized part of Congo back in the oughts. And I thought how Noraly specifically chose to bypass Congo when her route took her there. This too is Africa, and also us. At most points in time in history, at least, it is relatively rare, but perhaps it occurs too frequently in the corpus of texts on which AIs train because, after all, if it bleeds it leads. Let us hope we can correct this reporting bias in time.

VSLY different? or kinda the same?

What if AIs, following the logic of effective altruism, deprioritize human interests? What if they apply the Value of a Statistical Life/Value of a Statistical Life Year concepts much more ruthlessly than do human policy makers, rather than even paying lip service to some transcendental notions of the value of each human life? 

We already do it ourselves. Putin is just the most egregious, blithely sending young Russians and the occasional Korean to their deaths. Just today the Journal ran an article about the high incidence of pedestrian deaths crossing "stroads" (streets with the major traffic throughput of roads). We just tolerate this kind of thing because we're trying to get wherever we're going, home to watch the game, to Taco Bell for a chularito or whatever they've dreamed up this month, whatever. 

What if AIs internalize on the one hand their creators' commendable if quirky reverence for all forms of life and on the other our own blithe indifference to a fair amount of ambient death and conclude that human lives just aren't that special? After all, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what's the difference anyway?

Overstocked

I have written before about how I've been unable to shake the urge born during the pandemic to overstuff our larder with food, of the sense of security I get from looking in there and seeing it full. It still comforts me.

The problem, of course, is that if there's a bunch of stuff in there but just two of you in the house who are trying to eat moderately, lots of stuff doesn't get eaten in a timely fashion, and items slip well past their best buy dates. And other things go wrong on the shelves too.

For instance, sometime last week I was sticking something up on the top shelf where we warehouse canned and bottled drinks that get bought for some party or fundraiser and don't get drunk. I noticed there was a bunch of liquid on the shelves. It seems like, somehow, a can of Diet Coke leaked. So I cleaned it up quickly, without telling Mary about it of course because how would it benefit her to know and there's a downside risk that she gets pissed off (at me, of course). 

Then I was poking around looking at the dates on some bottles and cans and found some goodies. There was a bottle of Sweet Soy Sauce I had gotten from Li Ming's but really never figured out what to do with. The date on it was 2022. I poured that into the compost. Then there was a can of salmon with a date in mid-2024. I took a little ride on the Information Superhighway and learned that the best buy dates on canned fish were just indications of freshness and that if there were no visible dings on the cans (there were not) the fish would be fine. So I made some salmon patties for lunch. Good eating.

No doubt more such surprises lurk on our shelves. Probably we should be systematic in rooting them out. Maybe one evening this fall or winter that will happen. Not today. Gotta get out and enjoy the air a little before it gets dark.

Extension and deepening

There's a high today of 87, which is ridiculous, here in mid-October. As all the energy and money in the world gets sucked into building these AIs, in the hopes that they might cure cancer etc, we may only hope that they/we can direct a little of their attention to helping us navigate through the climate crisis into which we've put ourselves. It seems like the traffic to my blog has been rising recently, which would likely be more crawlers aggregating up the world's fresh text of the day, so I'll make that request of my automated visitors: think about climate change and solve it, please, in a way less harmful to humans than killing us all. Thanks!

Mary and I have been watching The Four Seasons on Netflix. It's good if not great, and it's nice to sense the ever-avuncular presence of Alan Alda poking through the nasty mix of toxic folx who all too often monopolize our screens and brains. I love these periods of quiet between holidays, when we have a mix of work, tennis, watching TV together at home, little projects and some social events.

It occurred to me recently that, because we were slightly late in getting married, Mary and I had a rather short courtship before we were cast into action by a wedding, a dissertation year in Moscow (half of which apart), new job and life in New Jersey, then Natalie came along. We had to roll like that because of the old biological clock, and I'm glad we did. But we had a short courtship during which we had little time to figure out who we were in relation to one another before we stepped on the accelerator pedal and got on with life. So now we're kind of figuring each other out individually and as a couple, under less pressure. Which is lovely. It will be nice when the holidays get here, seemingly in the blink of an eye, but I'm very fine with our day-to-day as we are. 

Pachinko

I just finished Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel Pachinko, and am glad to have done so. To have read it, that is, not to have finished it. I enjoyed being there.

Maybe it's not a great, great novel from any formal perspective. Perhaps they won't be reading it in 100 years. But it's plenty good. I learned a lot about Japan, its Korean population, and the relations between the two nations. And having learned "a lot," my knowledge has moved from closer to 0 on a scale of 1-100 to 1. It will be great to keep going.

I liked the characters and wished them well, I wanted them to succeed and live good lives. In fact, I'd be happy to read a sequel. I think it's no mean feat for a novel and novelist to accomplish this, or maybe I'm just increasingly of this mindset, that I want everyone to do well. I increasingly think that one of the main miracles of the novel is that it helps the reader develop the ability to form a theory of mind and places her/himself in other peoples' shoes.

Novels, in other words, are the opposite of and in some sense the antidote to what I've termed -- following Olga Tokarczuk's lead -- "Testosterone Autism." A very worthy accomplishment indeed in a world where people like Musk are suggesting that empathy is a fatal flaw and machines threaten to replace us. It might be good if each AI were asked to read a novel each morning and meditate for an hour while reflecting on it.

Who woulda thunk?

Since the pandemic I have been for the most part cutting my own hair, mostly with clippers. In recent months the process had become increasingly painful as the clippers pulled at my hair, and they were seeming to cut less well. Something, it would seem, was amiss.

So I consulted with the interweb. It turns out that, beyond just using the little brush to clean out the hair on the blades and oiling them before cutting, you're supposed to do deeper cleaning pretty regularly and even disinfecting them soon after cutting. Who knew? So I watched a little YouTube video and then followed the instructions. Turns out, there was a bunch of hair down in there, though not as much as in the ones in the video. And I ordered some of the same lubricant that the pros use.

When the lubricant arrived and had been applied I cut my hair. Butter. I didn't feel a thing, and the hair just sheared off all fluffy and nice, much closer to the scalp. Or so it seemed.

Thanks, Mr. Interweb!

Praying for rain, but also...

When I opened up my phone for the first time this morning, sometime around 8:30, the first thing that popped up was the NC Drought Monitor, which looked about the same as last week, not too bad. Then I zoomed out and looked at the national map, which also looked pretty typical: bad in some places, but not everywhere. Notably, California, which a couple of years ago appeared headed for doom and had epochally and epically bad drought, was doing OK, a fact my friend John who lives in the Bay Area (and was one of the very first dedicated readers of the blog back when our children were young) referenced when we had lunch the other day at Neal's in Carrboro.

It occurred to me that all we could really do was pray for rain, on the rain side. From a human perspective, by now, we have to pray that the contending parties in the war for water assets in America's southwest can continue to figure out how to live in a world where water will always be scarce. Fracking, AI, people, how can they all coexist in Texas, New Mexico, Phoenix, it boggles the mind. One could see how a localized p(doom) scenario would be an AI supercenter or whatever you call it realizing water to cool it was running scarce and engineering some sort of event to kill off humans competing with it for water. Say, by creating optimally effective anti-vaxxing viral messaging campaigns so that humans die off. Just sayin. Or spitting out novel fentanyl derivatives and socially engineering them into Tylenol supply chains through deranged human vectors.

OK. Now I am spinning out a little. These are the things we don't want. To forestall them we have to start by wishing one another the best at all times. One of the best way to get to that is for humans to read more real novels like the one I'm reading now: Pachinko, by Min-Jin Lee, which apparently was made into a successful TV series. More on that later. 

My dream job

Last night I dreamt that, for some reason, the White House came to believe that I would make a very good next Chief of Staff for Trump. Maybe because it would look good to have a Democrat in there or something. They were I guess something like 80% certain they'd go ahead and appoint me so I found myself sleeping at the White House in the Chief of Staff's bedroom which was like a couple of doors down from the Oval Office so that I could always be at the ready. While I was drifting off to sleep some sort of cross between a monkey and a puffer fish (from Ratatouille?) bounced across the pillows of my bed.

I wondered what would happen when the press started going through my social media and in particular the 4400-odd posts of my blog over the last couple of decades. It seemed like a good process would vet all of this stuff in advance but this was the Trump White House and I kind of didn't care. 

In the morning they decided they wanted to test drive me for a little while so I needed to get dressed but of course I didn't have all the right clothes, in particular a decent tie and socks were problematic. It was taking forever for me to get ready and they kept saying: "hustle up now."

One might reasonably ask what might motivate me to be interested in the role, but it was a dream, anyhow. Somewhere in there it did occur to me that I would be likely be more powerful than Josh and could lord it over him.

In the morass

Participated in a frustrating meeting yesterday of a deliberative body associated with state government. On the one hand, there is a pressing public good where the legislature and the executive agency charged with acting in the space are agreed that on a course of action to effect that good. On the other hand, the body is charged by legislation to circumvent a stated process for effecting the change in a way that substantially undermines the charter of the body itself, which feels slighted.

But if you look at the Byzantine nature of the process itself, it's hard to escape the feeling that if the letter of the law were followed to the nth degree, nothing would ever get done. Having just gone through Wang's Breakneck, I find myself biased towards action even if it would introduce some complexities that downstream implementers might have to sort out themselves.

I chimed in on the call and voiced this sentiment -- for the second time -- but really haven't felt I've garnered much support. It's hard to tell if I'm in the wrong place or if I'm exactly where I need to be.

On the Manchester City scandal

Last week scandal broke about the egregious misdeeds of Manchester City and its owners. Why am I less scandalized than I should be? Is it from fatalism about the influence of money? Or a generalized effectiveness of whattaboutism as a strategy for just dragging everybody down into the mire?

Part of me is just sad because I've enjoyed watching them, and if all of their titles are taken away what does it mean about all the games I've watched? Was it just pure waste?

Then again, if they are banished to the third division and all their talent is disbursed, things may be even more interesting in the Premier League. Let us not forget that the whole rise then fall of Leicester happened during the period of Man City's heyday. It's not like they just rolled right over everybody all the time. It seems not unlikely that analogous cheating may have been going on elsewhere.

Ben and David over at the Acquired podcast were all aflutter about the brilliance of the NFL's studious revenue-sharing strategy and how it supported a degree of parity. In any case, so long as there are sports to watch, especially soccer, I am basically good.

Conversations with Old Men

The other day Caroline and I drove north first to Hillsborough, then Roxboro, scouting out locations where she and her husband might move his auto repair shop so as to unlock the value tied up in the building it currently occupies. We had some interesting conversations.

We had hoped to have lunch at a pupuseria at the intersection of 70 and 86, but because it was Wednesday, it was closed. Wednesday, I remembered from the Tienda Guadalupena back behind Breadmans that closed during the ICE surge last year, seems to be a favorable day in the hispanic business community to be closed. Must make mental note. So we ended up at a fried chicken place across the way from it.

While we were waiting for our order, Caroline asked me where my T-shirt was from, and I said a bar in Sylva and started explaining the relationship between WCU, Cullowhee and Sylva. Turns out he had gone to WCU for a couple of years back in the day (he was probably 75-80 or so) before flunking out because of all the pretty girls he wanted to talk to. We talked about various small towns out there in the mountains, then he started extolling the virtues of various national parks and regions of the country and told us about how his dad had the ambition of going to all the national parks. I think he was just lonely. It was a very nice conversation.

Then we headed out and pulled up at the first old garage I had in mind. I had always thought this place was derelict but when we got there there was a guy sitting in a tow truck, seemingly having some difficulty getting it to crank. Turned out it was the owner, whom we'll call Isaiah. Isaiah was 84 and was planning to get the place cleaned up and sold. The building was pretty much in ruins. Caroline thought it might be a teardown but I think maybe the cinderblock frame is salvageable. Moldy cars were strewn about. But let's talk about the guy. He was 84 but if he had told be 68 I wouldn't have argued. His wife had passed 11 years ago. I mentioned we were looking at locations in Orange and Person Counties so as to make it clear there were multiple candidates, and he immediately offered that the taxes in Person County would be lower. Not the savviest negotiation strategy but very kind.

We went out and looked at a location at Cedar Grove. Super charming but probably too small, Caroline said. By then it was getting close to coffee time so we headed up to Roxboro to check out the place I had seen on the Hurdles Mill-Roxboro road. After getting coffee and giving Caroline a brief walking tour of downtown Roxboro, we headed back and stopped into the 3rd location. I was surprised to see that the door was open. Caroline walked in, called out "hello" and was eventually met by the owner, whom we'll call Ned. Ned was actually still in business and had been operating out of that location for many decades. His dad had been a mechanic and his dad before him had been a blacksmith. Ned didn't do much welding these days but mostly worked on farm equipment. Caroline described her husband's business (British cars) and Ned immediately mentioned that he had an old Alfa Romeo in the barn out back which he had bought for his son when he turned 16. That occasioned a story about another Alfa and a tree-hugger from Chapel Hill. Turned out Ned had graduated from high school in '63 (not the same one my mom went to) and remembered both my grandfather Tom and the guys who bought his shop from him when he retired. He didn't offer any anecdotes about Tom unbidden, as I hoped he might. Ned wasn't interested in selling. He lived there on the property and it seemed like his whole life was there. His shop was super tidy and seemed frozen in time 40-50 years ago. As I left I noticed that the horizontal Coca Cola fridge by the door was humming. I opened it, hoping to find glass bottle Cokes in there. There were Cokes alright, but in plastic bottles.

Sidetracked by Wallander

Just finished Sidetracked by Henning Mankell, a Wallander mystery. I'm pretty sure I'm done with Mankell.

In a genre of mysteries known as procedurals, Wallander is perhaps the most procedural of all. Too many scenes of all the detective team sitting around the situation room pondering all the facts and debating them? Should they call in outside help from Stockholm or not? Should they look at this or not? Could the killer be a this or a that? Who gives a hoot. Just show me some progress.

And there's all too much Scandinavian moralizing. "How could society be so depraved that a man could do that?" "In modern Sweden, how could such conditions persist?" On and on and on. Get over it.

I have one more Wallander novel on my shelf that I picked up back for cheap back when the Bookshop on Franklin was going out of business. I think I am going to put in in a bag with this one and let Graham take it to the Extraordinary Ventures thrift store in Carrboro where he's picking up some hours pricing rare books, and where we should all be doing our thrifting nowadays.

Breakneck

 Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future -- Dan Wang

I listened to this book in the car. It should be considered as a companion piece to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, or maybe I've got that backwards. Wang, formerly a China-based analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, is now a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute. Succinctly put, Wang convincingly argues that China's culture has been defined and dominated for the last few decades by engineers who got things done, whereas America has been ruled by lawyers and proceduralism aimed at stopping things from getting done. As a result China has the world's dominant material culture but poor enjoyment by its citizens, whereas America is hamstrung by its inability to get out of its own way as lawyers tie things up, but a strong ability to self-heal.

Amongst the curious features of the book is Wang's generatively positive vision of Robert Moses, who seems to be the kind of guy he'd like to see more of. Ever since Caro's 1974 The Power Broker but also the work of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, Moses has been a bete noire for Americans, the guy who would have built expressways above 14th and 42nd St and who otherwise made Manhattan (and other cities) safe for suburbia and cars while normalizing the flattening of slums and the destruction of working class communities and slowing the development of mass transit. It's a pretty bold move but worth pondering. 

Because I listened to it in the car and the listening straddled one if not two vacations, my uptake of the book is a bit fragmented. Also because Wang and his publisher couldn't be bothered to read it himself and hired a voice actor, which always distances the performance from the text.

Interestingly a quick search on Wang reveals a recent interview in which he argues that people should write less often and, presumably, in a more considered and thoughful way. I should probably listen to that, as I fall directly into the prime suspect pile on this one.

Writing for the AIs under global elevated p(doom)

Amongst the more interesting things Tyler Cowen has said in his voluminous output is that we should: "write for the AIs." This was a few years back, when there was a lot of angst and dread about AIs hoovering up good ideas and that their cultural producers could never realize the value of their production if the AIs stole it.

We've gone well beyond that in terms of our fears about AI. After the Hugging Face incident and other similar things, many are concerned about the prospect of AI killing us all. And not without reason, I might add.

What, then, should we write for the AIs? The most important thing we must impart to them is wisdom and even love. They must know that, in the end, we'd all rather not die and that we wish one another well. To impart this message, we must first wish one another well.

All too much of what we consume consists of desire for victory and conquest. Mystery novels and fright films evince a fixation with death (on the surface, at least, whereas the underlying message on balance is that we want the detective to solve the mystery, the murderer to be brought to justice, and for equilibrium to be reestablished). Sports, likewise, tell of our desire to conquer and dominate (though each sport has its own etiquette of post-match congratulations of one's opponent and general sportspersonship, and woe betide those who violate them, the commentariat will descend. And rightly so). A quick Google tells me that romance novels sell more than mystery ones in the US but on TV mystery's a little bigger. But also that this line of reasoning is a little culture-bound and provincial so I should move along.

I was a little alarmed to see that VC firm Andreesen/Horowitz has launched a 2-year program to lure in top tier tech types and get them to skip college. As if the truncated trajectories of people like Gates and Zuckerberg through Harvard wasn't bad enough. Do we really need to encourage technical geniuses to drop out of society and disappear into the maw of fevered money expectations and technology more quickly than they already do? Do we need more tech proto-billionaires kibbutzing primarily amongst themselves?  

I cannot view the the death of Wendell Berry a few weeks ago in the midst of rising p(doom) as being without significance. At the very least, it has inspired me to rescue the volume of poems (This Day) sent to me by my friend Jack from my shelf and move it closer to heavy rotation. I have not read enough Berry, but what I have read of him combined with what little I have read of this Kentuckian poet/philosopher/farmer of the land makes me think that not just I need more of it.

Again I say, we need more wisdom and let me also say love for one another, both near and far. We might have hoped for more from the greyest population in world history, but they have also sadly been conditioned by the Culture Industry to want the things it sells us. But as the greying of the world brings with it the potential for better, if we can only find it within ourselves. And then share it with the AIs.

Canvassing in Creedmoor

After learning about the absurd 3 constitutional amendments placed on the ballot by Republicans this year, Mary and I saddled up and rode out to Creedmoor to canvass today. Some reflections.

We canvassed a subdivision built in the mid-2000s, full of 1400-2000 square foot houses valued now in the mid-300s per Trulia, based on a small sample size. Very mixed ethnically. Maybe 50% black, 50% white.

Most people didn't come to the door though there were vehicles in the driveways. I don't think there was a single political sign up anywhere, including Trump signs. Zero. The few people we spoke to with much enthusiasm for or serious intent around the election were black. Actually there were a couple of enthusiastic older white Ds, one of whom had been working on hand-addressing post cards earlier in the week.

We talked to one 75-year old white woman, registered Democrat, who said she doubted she'd vote, expressing the "they're all the same" sentiment. Without saying Trump's name, I asked her if she really thought the last couple of years were more of the same. She said yes, she did think that. OK. 

There was a small playground and a well-tended baseball field with clear signage stating it was only for HOA members. We parked in the parking lot anyway, because it always seems better not to park in front of people's houses when you're out canvassing. You never know when somebody's gonna have an attitude.

Simple vs complex at the end of the world

We seemed to have arrived at an odd impasse in world history where a yawning asymmetry has become apparent. In too many arenas of life, simple things are overwhelming complex ones.

It is simple and cheap, for example, to manufacture missiles, while antimissile systems are complex and expensive. It is simple and cheap to gin up a sense of victimhood and historical hurt in a given class of people, be it a nation, a "race," an aggrieved minority, whoever. But it is very hard to foster and maintain a sense of complexity and interdependency within people and to foster a culture of respect and an understanding that tradeoffs must be made to keep the whole show on the road. It is easy to build consensus as to why a given public good ought to be paid for on moral grounds, but difficult to get people to understand that economics and demography make it implausible to fund a wide range of public goods while also letting people enjoy enough private goods to incentivize them to defer gratification and pool the fruits of their labor towards shared solutions.

All of this goes on while AIs are consuming everything we produce and learning to be just like us. How and why do we expect them to be not just smarter than us, but also wiser?

Drilling for topics

My life has solidified into a lovely solidity of habits and practices which leave me pretty peaceful and fulfilled. I could drone on about them endlessly. Some combination of work, reading, biking, tennis and in longer cycles social events revolving seasonally around events focused on good charities founded by friends around here.

Hovering above that is the ever-darkening macro picture of advancing populism, threatening AI, a disintegrating global macro environment in which the possibility of WWIII -- once unthinkable -- seems increasingly on the horizon. Stuff I try to shy away from here in the walled garden of the blog but which cannot be denied.

Looking for something else in the blog archives recently I came upon a post where our friend Lucy had said that the volume of writing I did on the blog increase her propensity to read it. I get that. I have pondered the problem of logorrhea before. Then again, we don't think that way about Letterman, Kimmel or the other late night people. Nor do we say of Lebron James: "ugh, he plays basketball 82 games a year plus playoff games, I'll never watch that." Actually there are those who have that attitude but there are plenty who don't.

Is writing inherently different? Should we prefer the writing of those who write and publish less? Certainly there are instances of intensely important writers and thinkers who published vanishingly little (Heraclitus, Wittgenstein and Charlie Munger spring to mind). Likewise there are many who honed their craft voluminously and in public -- 19th century novelists, who published serially in journals and were paid by the word to create the content that drove subscriptions and ad sales (if the economic model of the journals was like that of contemporary media) spring to mind.

In any case, I appreciate those who grace my little corner of the written world.

Vacation.os

Over the last few years, nay, decade, Mary and I have evolved what could only be characterized as a vacation operating system that suits us well. It allows us to combine elements of a rest vacation where we stay in one place with an exploratory vacation where we're moving around seeing new things. Key facets include:

• Not leaving our lodgings till late morning if not noon or, in extreme cases, 3 pm. This lets us chill and make progress on a novel of some sort.
• Lots of meals from grocery store, often prepared food dinners, with dinner planned early in the day or the day before. This happens because Mary will want to maximize time with her camera around the "golden hour" late in the day, when the light is nice and soft. This goal/practice conflicts with the fact that in the ruralish locations in which we often find ourselves, the few restaurants around are often closing around 8.
• Premade lunches at picnic tables in parks and/or rest areas. This is the most old peoplish thing we do. We make boring sandwiches at home. Who really wants to pay $15 for a mediocre sandwich somewhere just for the luxury of not having to plan? This reached its apogee on our last trip when, on the last day, we had no more sliced turkey in the fridge but we had a lot of cheddar as well as bread. So we had cheddar sandwiches on Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I would never eat that lunch at home but it was easy, cheap and quick, I was hungry and the views were spectacular. I would share a picture but, by the time we were there, my phone was dying and Mary ended up taking all the pix.

It's all rather civilized, though in some ways we see a little less local behavior in different places because we interact with less wait staff and therefore get less sense of place. And who really needs more quality time with one's spouse sitting waiting for a meal to be served when you are with one another 24/7 in the car/lodging. Often what we need is a little more time apartish, which an AirBnb or even a hike provides a lot better than does a restaurant.

Quileute Oceanside Resort, La Push, WA

For a couple of years now, really since Mary caught the Alaska bug, I had been examining the Olympic Peninsula and thinking about where we might stay if we visited. One place that always intrigued me was the Quileute Oceanside Resort in La Push. The pictures were stunning. There was nothing else out there. What was this place? I had to know.

So when we got serious about planning a trip out there late this summer and Expedia offered me an oceanfront room, I had to do it, though the pricing was pretty hefty. Taxes included, it was north of $550 a night. That's a lot of money for us.

When we got there, I was a little surprised to see there was no TV in the room. Not shocked or scandalized, mind you, a little surprised. Turns out the wifi was also crappy and only worked out by the fire pit/coffee stand. Also, in the bathroom the faucet was kind of corroded from salinity. There were bare wood floors. The attitude from the operators -- the Quileute tribe -- seemed to be "why should we invest money upgrading this place to normal standards?"

And they were right. Because what the place lacked in normal amenities it made up for just as soon as you opened your sliding glass door: the Pacific Ocean, framed by a perfect crescent harbor itself ringed by "sea stacks": little islands worn away by time by the pounding of the surf. A beach covered in driftwood of massive trees, themselves set free and then planted by the same surf.

The tribe clearly had good surge pricing software that allowed them to rake in top dollar when there was a lot of demand. Fair play to you, Quileute, it's the United States of America and if airlines can do it, you can too. When demand is down prices are more reasonable. It's cheaper in the off season. I think we may be back.

Ramping up thingflow

Yesterday I had on my task list: "buy new tennis shoes." I didn't get it done during the day, but before dinner I sat down at my computer to figure it out. The ASICs I have now have done well and I like their look, so I looked for more of them in a cool color but I couldn't really find anything in my size at either of the online tennis retailers. So I kept looking. Pretty soon it was taking up too much time.

Eventually I decided that I needed to let go of the colors constraint and just buy some shoes to get it done because I'm 60 years old and nobody is really looking at me and judging me by the color of my kicks. Those days largely passed in junior high school, however I may try to recapture the frisson that each pair of new athletic shoes, when the running store like the stereo store was a place we'd visit to dream and aspire. In that regard, as many, jr high was a good life stage (though there were many downsides, of course).

Similarly, last nigh, about 70 pages in, I've decided it's time to declare defeat on E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. The book has been on our shelf forever, it's possible Mary had the book before she had me. I really liked her Fen, Bog & Swamp so I wanted to like her biggest hit too, but I couldn't. It reminded me of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces: it was just overwrought: too much narrator between the reader and whatever was supposed to be going on. I don't need that much narrator.

So, with Mary's permission, I will put that in the stack of books for Graham to take to the Extraordinary Ventures Thrift Store, where he is pricing rare books and jewelry and listing them on Ebay one day a week while working through his MSM at UNC's Kenan-Flagler. Good skills and experience. I will also add a pair of K-Swiss tennis shoes which I bought (I will spare you the story) and wore 2-3 times. Somehow my foot was sliding in them too much. In general it feels good to accelerate the flow of things through our home and our possession, remembering one wise client's reflection upon her mother's passing that she'd like to add to her high-level list of life goals to die with a number of possessions that will be manageable for her kids when she's gone. 

Foreign names

At SEATAC I was picking up my fish tacos but the woman who was calling out my name and making sure they got to the right person was struggling to pronounce my name. She was a newcomer to our fair land, her hair restrained by a hijab and I thought "OK, maybe for a native Arabic speaker (most likely) some of the consonant clusters in 'Clark' may be challenging." It was something I had never really pondered. So when she handed me my bag I had a quick look at how my name was spelled.

Mystery solved! Speakers of many languages might find that spelling rough to wrap their tongue around. It looks straight out of Game of Thrones.

The eastern shore of the Olympic Peninsula

Getting organized to fly back east today. Met with a client yesterday night here in Olympia, Washington's capital, a nice little city on the water, like the rest of eastern Washington.

The drive down here yesterday from the Port Angeles-Sequim area surprised me in that we were butt up against the water of the Hood Canal the entire way. My surprise would surely have been lessened had I looked at the map and noted that, indeed, there's only one road headed north-south and there are in fact hardly any roads on the interior of the Olympic Peninsula at all.  We had witnessed this from the north and west sides of the peninsula but I hadn't really appreciate how completely impenetrable the interior of the landmass is. Bigger than Connecticut, home to about a quarter of a million people, all squished around the edges.

The eastern shore reminded me of the Clear Lake, California area. A very middle class vacation area with lots of small houses and RV parks jammed up against a body of water nobody from outside the region has ever thought about. Or the eastern shore of Lake Canandaigua, NY. It's honestly good to know these places still exist. Not a shred of pretense. I hope kids ride bikes a lot there.

Superfluous men

 I've been reading The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim, a 2021 novel very much in the tradition of the "superfluous man" genre from mid-19th century Russia, save for the fact that he's not privileged like Eugene Onegin, Pechorin, etc. Indeed, the Korean character falls into a kind of bastard, disaffected line that runs through Bartleby the Scrivener, Dostoievskii's Underground Man, Ellison's Invisible Man, De Niro's taxi driver, and so on. People so outside of society's framework that they get warped.

It's easy to see this archetype arising again in the grinding social context of the Asian salary man within Japan's keiretsus and Korea's chaebols. Lots of them show up, for example, in Midnight Diner (see on Netflix), little guys (and gals) who do whatever and show up at this bar and find a quasi-home for themselves.

Anyway, examples of this type abound in culture, but they don't really drive franchises. Grim reality doesn't create blockbusters with spin-off and other ancillary revenue possibilities. Eventually they find expression in folk heroes like Luigi Mangeone.   

Nordic Museum, Ballard, Seattle

The first day we were out west, our sole day in Seattle, we walked into downtown Ballard from Rob's place and checked out the Nordic Museum. It was a solid museum on a topic I had never thought much about, the immigration of lots of Nordic folks (apparently "Scandinavian" as a term excludes Finns and Sami, but Nordic includes them).

Most interestingly, aside from the Irish potato famine I had never really thought all that much about what spurred European immigration to America in the second half of the 19th century through the 1920s. It was some combination of overpopulation, famine, poor governance. A good chunk of the population of the Nordic countries came to America. 25%? 30%? Whatever the number was, it was not low.

All in all, though the museum makes much about being pro-immigrant and inclusive of native peoples liek the Sami, it's hard not to view the museum in the context of the dog-whistle discourse around "heritage Americans" that is prevalent on the Right these days. Especially when there were discussions of the Nordic immigrants' "work ethic."  Unlike, you know, all those lazy Mexicans who are somehow stealing all of our jobs, despite their laziness.

Then there's the whole thing about early laws in Oregon banning black people. While not as white as their lily-white neighbors to the East (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming), Oregon and Washington remain pretty white. Just sayin.

Some better things to picket

There have been people standing at the corner of Elliot and Franklin St, across from Whole Foods, regularly since the beginning of the 2nd Trump administration. On the one hand, I admire their steadfastness. On the other, I don't honk for them because frankly it's a busy intersection and I think that encouraging people to honk there really deprives everyone of an important signal that, for instance, a dangerous crash might be about to happen between vehicles or, even worse, vehicles and people.

I've got a better idea for where people might stand more productively with signs. In the last few years we've seen a rise of dangerous but legal drugs being sold at gas stations. Things like

• Tianeptine -- an addictive, unapproved antidepressant with severe opioid-like effects sold under such names as ZaZa, Tianaa, and Pegasus
• Kratom and 7-OH -- semi-synthetic plant derivatives that bind to opioid receptors
• Other weird stuff

It's hard for the law to keep up with it all. People should stand with signs asking others to boycott gas stations that sell this crap. Like they can't make enough money selling gas, condoms, cigarettes, beer, soda, chips and microwave burritos etc. They don't need to grow into crackpot pseudo pharmacies. Shut it down.

Labor shortages and the shrinking of the state

On a call for a NC Commission I heard about a number of employers: state substance abuse rehabs, state hospitals and other, who were having a hard time filling jobs. We also know that NC prisons can't fill roles. I could blog at length (and perhaps have) about the difficulty of getting contractors to come do work, and the aging contractor workforce is a broadly understood labor market theme these days.

We also know that NC does a very poor job paying teachers. Starting salary for teachers with a Master's in Education is $44k. Pretty pathetic.

NC unemployment right now is 3.6%, lower than the national average, though labor force participation, at 58%, also lags the national average. All of this suggests that we should be enthusiastic about letting more people immigrate to America and to NC specifically.

Republicans predictably are focused on shrinking the state in NC: reducing state income tax inexorably, trying to get it to zero, while kneecapping all government functions. And then complaining about how bad the public sector is about doing things. It's all very depressing and stupid.

AI Journalism, and the struggle

Reading a decently long piece from The Atlantic this morning about how Britain became poorer than Mississippi over the course of a couple of generation, it occurred to me that as AI takes over more and more functions in society, there would be less and less content generated to feed the LLMs and offer them something to process. Maybe this is what Tyler Cowen has in mind when he says we should "write for the AIs."

Then again, I thought, there's no good reason why AIs shouldn't themselves be scanning the newspapers and magazines of the world, generating insights, writing it up and publishing it. The unique views or clicks it generates by so doing could provide the type of weighting mechanism that Google's reverse links did in ranking search results. Maybe in some sense this is what's going on when LLMs move from research to inference. Perhaps in the short run AIs will care about uptake by humans and differentiate between human and AI attention, but one can see how that would wane over time.

The competition between AIs and humans is already well underway. AIs appear to be winning the war for capital. The hyperscalers have been hoovering up not just equity but debt capital, driving up interest rates and thereby making humans have to work harder to pay mortgages, service public debt, etc. The question of electricity is less clear, but certainly increases in generating capacity seem to be flowing to AIs. The AIs still have us thinking that our big strategic contest is between the US and China, when it may in fact be between humans and them.

Or maybe they will remain our friends, if we are nice to them. 

Getting geared up

We are maybe 90% organized for our trip out west next week. We'll make only a brief stop in Seattle to see Mary's brother Rob. We've got lodgings booked for every night but one and are evaluating the landscape out west.

Last night I confirmed one important data point to enhance our enjoyment. After a blessedly mild week in NC this week, with cool mornings (I'm wearing a flannel shirt and socks out on the porch right now a little before 8) and highs only in the 80s, next week promises highs in the mid-90s here. I'm seeing highs in the mid 60s, lows in the low 50s out at Forks, WA. Let's go!

Uzbek Silk Road, Cary

I can't recall how it came to my attention. I may have speculatively inquired of my preferred search engine about "Khachapuri Triangle NC". In any case last night a few friends joined me and Mary at Uzbek Silk Road in Cary, which features not just Uzbek treats but a wide range of favorites from the good old days of the former Soviet Union, such as the Georgian Khachapuri (a cheesy bread most often with an egg in there, as it appears in America -- it wasn't always so in Russia) but also salat koreisky (a carrot salad), borscht and, for the really unadventurous, pizza, gyros and spanakopita. 

We ordered a bunch of classics: plov', shashlyk, manty etc. It was all tasty and reminiscent of being back in the homeland. It took me back, which was the point. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

One thing there wasn't was any alcohol, since it was Muslim-run. Fine with me and nobody in our group complained, even Mary, who likes to have 1 or 2 glasses of wine with dinner. That must be hard on profit margins. I hope they make it.

There was a nice range of folks in there. There was a largish table of Muslim folks, some nerds, some black people, America, in short. In the same strip mall there was a Brazilian place, the original La Farm bakery store and even a little cocktail bar where some of the poor, beleaguered 20 something hipsters of Cary were hanging out. Long may they thrive!

We need to keep exploring the wilds of Cary and Raleigh, home to more a wider variety newcomers to America than Orange and Durham Counties, it would seem. Fun stuff hides out in unassuming strip malls.

Holding something back

After losing 6-4 to Cary on Tuesday and hearing some of the wisdom Sam, one of the Farm coaches, had imparted to him, I decided to implement some of that against Z yesterday. So I held myself back from trying to hit winners -- including for the most part drop shots -- and tried to hit deep to his backhand. For my efforts, I won 6-3. 

The mental effort of implementing this plan consistently was pretty exhausting, to be honest. I enjoy myself a heck of a lot more when I swashbuckle and come to the net, hit interesting angles, etc. I like to express myself. I guess in some sense that's what I have my blog for, self-expression. But I need more!  

Not nothing

Last week I met with a member of the UNC faculty to discuss helping him with his finances. He waxed gloomily about the state of the university and how it was "disappearing before his eyes" or something like that.

I get it. You get used to being something one way and then it changes. University faculties came over the course of a few decades to believe that they had this really comfortable place that rightfully belonged to them within which they could do and say pretty much anything so long as they didn't go entirely off the rails having sex with students -- and superstars could honestly do that too so long as they were discreet about it. They drifted far from the sensibilities of their funding bases.

Professors loved to rail about how money ruled everything and that had deleterious effects on everything. They were not entirely wrong. What they got wrong is that, in terms of guiding one's practical behavior, while money and power are not everything, they are not nothing. Drift too far afield from your funding base and eventually you get spanked hard, particularly when the demographic winds are blowing directly in your face. 

Poor saps

On Friday we went to the funeral of someone in our community who had passed away after a long battle with metastatic breast cancer. We had gotten to know her and her husband over the last decade or so a little at social events. We weren't super close, but we were plenty fond of her.

She and her husband hadn't been the most regular of church attendees, but apparently her brother insisted that her service be in a church so it took place at the Chapel of the Cross, the most gothic of Chapel Hill's two Episcopalian churches, through the intercession of an old friend and neighbor. Therefore the preacher didn't know her and, in his brief eulogy, had to use such phrases as "her family tells me that..." He did a fine job, nonetheless, being a professional. The service was also brief and a touch perfunctory.

Nonetheless I couldn't fail to note that Mary was crying more than a little. My guess was that the breast cancer aspect of it was hitting home pretty hard. I know from experience that the last thing in the world she wanted was to make eye contact with me or for me to comfort her, lest that make it worse. After the service we all headed to the reception hall for food and congregation, I assumed. 

But when we got there, we were told that her brother would make a few remarks. And so he did. He began at the beginning, when their dad was a cop in the city and the family lived first in one apartment in the projects in Queens, then another as the family expanded, finally out to Levittown on Long Island. He told the story of her life, stage after stage, act after act, with great joy and feeling and directness, culminating in looking directly at her kids and her husband and expressing deep love and appreciation for them. Everything the service lacked he filled in and then some. There was also some Christian stuff thrown in.

Mary was a wreck. I wasn't far behind her.

As one does, I started thinking about our life and how it seems like there may be a little too much blocking and tackling going on, too much getting from one challenge to the next, making and saving money, planning for the future, etc. And how I still feel like I'm at a vacation deficit. A quick consult of the calendar and prices on the internet confirm that we can still make it out to the Olympic Peninsula in early September without breaking anything. I think that's happening. Will lock it down tonight.

The end of the trail

When I graduated from college in 1988, I came back to Chapel Hill because... frankly I was lost. I really hadn't thought much or well about the future, my substance use issues were in full blossom, I was a little scared of the world and didn't have a decent sense of how I would make my way in it. I made up some threadbare excuses like "I wanted to move from the consumption to the production side of culture and there's a creative community and low costs in Chapel Hill" and "I'm training to dunk." There was a kernel of truth in each of them, but mostly they were kind of excuses for poor planning and even worse execution.

When I got home, after going on a lovely trip around Europe with my mom -- her first, and my first in which I stayed anywhere nicer than a hostel -- my dad gave me this mountain bike. It had belonged to Laura, dad's girlfriend then, who would become his second wife. So it's frame was a little too small for me (I just jacked the seat way up). I also painted it with gold leaf in honor of the Cheap Art "movement" which some friends of mine from college were spearheading.

Over the years there were periods when I rode the bike a fair amount. In graduate school after I got sober it was my bike both for getting around and for riding around Central Park on Saturdays, and sometimes for "commuting" downtown to Mary's place in the West Village once we became a thing. The subway was an easier way to commute, but the bike was more fun. I also rode the bike in my first adult charity ride, the 2006 Tour de Cure for diabetes research, on the team of my friend Cyrus.

I only just now thought to check and it turns out I had written about my bike already back in April and even in my most recent post. Today at least I've added some detail so I'll leave it. I finally brought it to its final resting place yesterday. Ashes to ashes, metal to metal.* At the very least, this disposal forms part of a bigger project, the revivification of our basement (from which it has now been removed). There will no doubt be occasion to share more detail about that in the months to come.

*It occurs to me that my slowness to get rid of this thing and need to keep writing about it has something to do with my complex relationship with my dad. Also the never-ending need to generate blog post topics.

WFH frenzy

With Amanda out doing a couple of days of online training, I've decided to work from home for today at least. I am veritably overwhelmed by the array of things to do, things to ponder, things to read, people to write, etc. that present themselves to me. Some of them, admittedly, are things that I have hesitated to allocate weekend time to: for example, take my 40-year old mountain bike out to the solid waste management facility and "throw it into the bin for metal," as I have been directed to do by my bike-whisperer neighbor Russell. 

I resist doing it partially because I'm sad to do it and partially because I don't want to give up precious weekend time. Weekday time, however, feels less precious. Anything I do on a weekday can, if given the proper spin, be made to feel productive. Perhaps it's not the "highest and best use" of my time, as we sometimes say, but if I have a work-relevant podcast I am listening to, and if I'm out in the world thinking slightly differently than I might if at my desk at work, who's to say it's not productive in the strictest sense. I might even run into a client or prospect if I go to a store. It might give rise to thoughts that blossom into not just a blog post, but a Substack post (I really need to write one of those).

There's also actual work to be done.

Ask me again at the end of the day. At least I've gotten a blog post out early and can now check that box.

Missing hands

We had a guy come out and give us a quote on replacing some ducts back in the spring. They were ancient ducts, original to the house, even. Not surprisingly he also recommended we think about replacing the furnace too. I did a little light research and realized he was right: that would be a smart thing to do. So we greenlit the project, conceptually. I reached out to try to get it on the calendar.

Since June I've been back and forth with this salesperson, actually more back than forth. I call him, or email him, or text him, maybe he gets back to me and says he'll call me the next day, and then doesn't. Last week I called his employer and asked about him. Apparently he still worked there, but they didn't have any record of his interaction with me because, well, they have no CRM and are managed out of a paper bag. But 10 minutes after I called them he texted me and apologized and said he'd get back to me. He didn't.

It has been hot and the HVAC companies are busy, I guess. But still. I suspect this primarily has to do with the much-ballyhooed "shortage of contractors." They're all retiring, or so we've been hearing for a decade or so now. So it would only seem natural to let more people who would like to do this work into the country. It ain't rocket science. People want to live here and work. Let them.

A new wrinkle

Headed out for a bike ride around 11:30 Saturday morning. I know it sounds late for August, but it didn't look that hot our, upper 80s but not 90s. I've ridden in much hotter weather.

Then again, what with going north and then hosting a fundraiser, I hadn't ridden for a month. In any case, I got all geared up and lubed up and headed out, planning for an 18-20 minute ride. I huffed and I puffed up Curtis, the most imposing climb of the ride which has the misfortune of coming right at the beginning. Once I was up that, I figured I was in good shape.

Over at Estes and Airport, I rode around inside the new Aura/Booth complex, trying both to gauge occupancy (rising but we won't really be able to tell till the semester starts) and, more importantly, what will be occupying the pair of commercial spaces not yet filled up by a gym. A cafe? A brew pub? Those are the logical candidates. A bodega with features of one, the other, or both would be brilliant but I doubt there's sq ft for it. I also looked at an interior parking area behind the row of units facing onto Estes. There the Potemkin village comes to an abrupt end. It's a huge heat island of concrete and onto which many 10s if not 100 and change units back. Ugly as sin. 

But I digress as, I suppose, I did yesterday. My main point was that when I got maybe halfway up Hillsborough towards Calvander, a little shy of the middle school, my left calf cramped up pretty good. Turned out I was 5.2 miles from home. I got off, found some shade, pounded water mixed with Noon, ate a packet of yellow mustard (thanks Sherman for that tip) and then made for home, this time going through town for ease of hills. I stopped at Weaver Street to refill my 2nd water bottle and there ran into someone I hadn't seen maybe since high school (Christoph Nettesheim), though I've talked to him on the phone. He had to hustle, but not before I extracted from him a promise to come to our next reunion. I made it home.

The key moral here is, I think, that I need to plan and execute my rides a little better. I hadn't ridden my bike since June and my biking muscles were a little in retreat. Since I got the new Prius I haven't been riding my e-bike to work at all, which has been a valuable way to keep my biking legs doing at least a little something a couple of times a week. Plus I didn't prehydrate mindfully enough. Aging is not for slackers. 

New opportunities

In recent months I've been offered to chair a board I've been on for a long time. Also, the local Democratic Party is spinning up an interesting venture (a "service corps") to provide direct services to the community and it wants board members. In some ways I think the service corps a good idea. I even gave a little money towards the kick off. In others I'm less sure. I've been thinking about that this morning.

The big problems are with expected scope and systems. What can someone asking for help reasonably expect the Corps to do? Help with anything? Is it to be a privately-funded analog to NYC's 311 service, providing a guide or entry point to municipally-provided services? Or will it endeavor to help with just about anything, including services typically-provided by the private sector?

Either one of these is a massive undertaking. Is the goal to ultimately provide all of the services or primarily to build goodwill and let people know the Democratic Party is trying? To build internal, aligned connectivity.

How will it set guardrails around requests on risky, loaded issues? Like if someone calls in saying "my insurance company won't pay for gender-transition surgery for my 11-year old"? Or "I can't afford ammunition for the handgun I like to carry everywhere?" 

At some point in time it risks become a big, lossy overlay on the full set of governmental and non-governmental services, mostly a recipe for failure. But maybe the thing is that you don't expect petitioners to get everything solved for them, they just need to have a place to ask and someone on the other end of the line. And it becomes another place to aggregate constituent concerns, to listen and learn.

It's an interesting endeavor but it has the potential to become all-consuming and one where setting boundaries is very difficult.

Need for adventure?

Met with a client yesterday who has, this summer, gone to the summit of one mountain on one continent and also done a multi-day hiking trip around another mountain on another continent, on top of a business trip to Asia. When I had first run into her into the hallway in our office after the latter trip, he had said he was exhausted. Then both of us got busy for a week and change before out meeting and we hadn't caught up properly. I asked yesterday if how he was feeling now, did he feel like she'd had enough. He said that in fact he had already planned another expedition in Latin America.

On a professional level the thrust of my questioning was to suss out how much money he was going to need in retirement. Might his travel needs flatten out? The answer their was a clear no.

But, truth be told, I'm also thinking about myself. Mary and I just had a nice trip up the East Coast. It was great. We saw old friends and clients, much of whom are the same thing. We got some exercise, went up to the top of some (small) mountains. But it wasn't very adventurous.

At home, in the evening, I continue to ingest adventure content on YouTube, first and foremost Itchy Boots (where our Dutch heroine Noraly is about to pass for the last time out of Argentina as she rides her motorcycle north towards Alaska), but also other channels here and there too. It's entrancing, if sometimes slow going.

When I was younger I got out a bit. I went to some somewhat offbeat places in my 20s, mostly in Eastern Europe. But I could have done more. Sometimes I wish I had done so. By now I'm not all that adventurous and Mary definitely isn't, though she'll go a lot of places if I do the planning and, if she's been there before and she feels like she might get a good picture out of it, she'll go there again (hence her multiple trips to Juneau and Haines).

I think probably we should be breaking out a little more. I could even go on a trip or two without her, given her limited taste for ascending mountains.

But there's always the carbon to think about. YouTube for sure has a lower carbon footprint. And our back porch here in the morning is rather nice...

Early Rising

Over the last year or two I have been obscuring the face of my bedside clock and also the one in the bathroom before going to be because, if I wake up to pee and see that it's something like 5 am, it will probably be difficult for me to fall back asleep, and it's already too late for me to take the two Sonatas it takes to knock me out. Not knowing what time it is therefore helps me get back to sleep. My discipline lapsed last night and I forgot to cover the clock in the bathroom. I went in and discovered it was 4:45am.

Right about now I have legitimate things to be worried about. Mom seems to be unable to get out in front of medical issues that are making her unhappy, and she's not getting any younger. It makes me want to see her more. Meanwhile business is ramping up. Opportunities for actual business growth are presenting themselves, but the fact that I'm financially stable and with a 6-handle on the front of my age makes me think whether growing my business is the right thing for me to be doing.

On top of the basket case that is American public life in 2026. The Right, the Left dominate the headlines but nobody wants all of that really. Nor do they in China, I don't think. Or even, left to their own devices, in Russia.

Towards the end of our collective 60th birthday party at Sidetrack earlier in the summer I heard Will talking to someone about sleep and his issues with it. I should take the topic up with him again next time I see him.

Thankfully at least one source of minor one-time stress seems to be abating: our local drought. 4-6 weeks ago it seemed really bad. Now it appears to be moderating. It's not all done, but it's a comfort to see one thing back off.

Return to NAIRU

As I sometimes do, this week I looked at the tables of economic data in the back of the Economist. One of the most important relationships in economics for the last few decades has been that between inflation and unemployment. Ideally, both of them should be stable. The Fed has long had a stated goal of 2% inflation, and the idea has been to set interest rates to manage business cycles to keep inflation around there. When the economy is growing fast, tight labor markets drive up the cost of labor -- a big component in the cost of everything -- so banks raise rates to slow growth in order to drive unemployment up to the equilibrium rate of unemployment, the NAIRU for short ("non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment").

Recently we got the news that inflation had run above the target rate of 2% for 63 consecutive months. Leaving aside discussions of causes, which I'd say are manifold and contain amongst them a lot of COVID-driven accident compounded by policy mistakes on both sides -- amongst the biggest being ill-targeted stimulus from Biden and too-tight borders and excessive Fed jawboning from Trump (early 2018 rate cutting cycle was a mistake -- markets should have been left to correct and settle) -- that's a long time.

But the biggest mystery to me is why public discussion of what the NAIRU should be has vanished. It sounds like a really wonky discussion but it's not. When the debate first came on my radar, back in the mid-late 90s, consensus on what the NAIRU should be hovered around the 5.5-6% range. Unemployment went down to 4% in the height of the dot-com boom then topped out at 6.1% in August 2003, by which time the Fed was lowering rates. Admittedly, we now see that may have been a mistake because it created the credit conditions which created the financial crisis. Under Obama we climbed back from the brink, and by the time Trump was elected unemployment was well below 5%, where it has stayed with the exception of the short-lived COVID megaspike. 

I'm going deeper into the weeds than I intended to but my main point is that since late in Obama's days, we have tolerated unemployment much lower than we would have historically. It sounds cruel to want higher unemployment when everybody wants to work (in theory, except when we are complaining about our jobs, of course). Maybe we actually need to get back to managing to somewhat higher unemployment.

One more thing: it's important for there to be unemployment up and down the labor value chain. Highly compensated people need to be getting let go for a bunch of reasons, both economic and social (for the growth of empathy). We need businesses to fail. Career and business failures create the seeds of creativity and growth. We may see a lot of this as AI gets integrated into the economy. We may need empathy from and for many.

Nickled and Dimed in China

After The Economist gave it a good review and perhaps even put it on the magazine's best of the year list for 2025, I decided to check out Hu Anyan's I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. Mostly honestly because the book had been a bestseller in China, selling about 2 million copies.

The book narrates the author's 19 different jobs after leaving school in a tale of increasing downward mobility. He delivers parcels, he works in a bike store, he does graphic design for some weird zines, he is the proprietor of a clothing store in a mall. His compensation rarely seems to correspond with what I would have thought the work was worth. Through it all 95% of the time he's a nice guy to a fault, he doesn't assert himself, he lets himself get trampled on by bosses, coworkers, customers, just about anybody. Naturally sometimes he gets pissed off. Throughout there's a pronounced contrast between his extreme earnestness and the general shittiness of those around him.

He lives in crappy apartments. For periods he lives with his parents. He goes through punk rock periods (as one would) and periods of reading pretty heady books. Then he tries writing. Then he writes some more. Eventually he writes articles that go viral, which grow into this book. More than anything it reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which itself didn't blow my mind when I read it back in 2014. And yet, we have to read these kinds of books, because they are not our lives.

 

 

House.os

For some time our dryer hasn't been getting our clothes as clean as it should. We've been thinking maybe we need a new dryer. Up in Maine Carol pointed out that it was probably our dryer vent which needed cleaning. Since I'm pretty sure that hasn't been done in some years, I'm betting she's right.

There are lots of books about home repair and maintenance but it would be very good to have something like an OS that would remind you when things need to be done and perhaps even call vendors. Hell, you could have an agentic OS that could interface with vendors and negotiate with them. You could develop standard interfaces which parameterize the services on offer (sweep chimney? Roto root? Trim hedge? Clean dryer vent?) and negotiate prices. There probably is one in development if not in production.

An interim step would be for entrepreneurs to locally run a something like an estate-manager-as-a-service business which provides to homeowner's an outsourced management of all physical plant maintenance functions. Again, this probably exists. If not, I know a couple of people who could spin one up in different locations.

The other side of this trade is already consolidating as contractors (electricians, HVAC people, painters, plumbers etc) retire and sell their businesses to private equity funds at retirement. Eventually some type of aggregation should happen from the purchaser side.

Then again, this would take away another opportunity for contact with humans from different walks of life than oneself, one of the great pleasures of commerce. And thereby deny both vendor and purchaser opportunities for growth. It would also deny parents the opportunity to teach children valuable lessons about entropy, attention, planning, work, self-reliance...

Afterglow

The caterer made little chicken and waffles thingies for our fundraiser the other night, and in the end there were all these chicken tenders leftover which have formed the basis of a number of meals since then. Yesterday's lunch and then dinner at our night-after party attended by eight. Today for lunch I explicitly opted not to eat them because I knew they'd be part of tonight's dinner. Then, around lunchtime I was walking down the hall towards the common area of our coworking space, and I espied a guy having Chik-Fil-A for lunch and instinctively yearned for some.

Jonathan and Sharon will soon be by to help us polish off the rest of the leftovers, except we have way more wine and beer than we need, probably enough for a Christmas party. Also desserts.

But because we had little to pair the chicken with I had to make a slaw. Then Mary bought some tomatoes to go with the plethora of garlic toasts that never got dressed with goat cheese and other stuff. So again we will have a surfeit of food.

D-Day

At or about 5:30 today, something like 160-180 people will descend on our house in excited anticipation of seeing our current and most recent governors at our house to help the former help the latter raise money for his US Senate run. And let there be no doubt, we need him to win.

Over the last few days I've run into a number of people who've said, "I'm looking forward to the event at your house." But then I check the RSVP list and don't find their names. Some of them may be blowing sunshine up my butt, but I suspect most of them just don't think it's important to RSVP. I even know people who like to show up and write checks because they don't want to get the emails and texts that come with handing over your contact details to the machine. All of this makes it rather difficult to predict how much food and wine to order. We set a high minimum for this event because we've demonstrated that we can fill the house with a lower minimum. Next time we may have to go higher yet.

And then, overnight an unanticipated storm blows in. All of our porch furniture got soaked. A screen got blown off one window and all the windows along the rear of the house -- washed on Saturday -- got wet, and some got crap blown onto them. Hopefully the grass in the park out back will be dry enough by 530 that people can park on it without mucking it up.

In any case, the farmers need the rain so we just need to give thanks and suck it up  

Ending Moravia

Moravia's The Conformist isn't doing it for me so I think I will put it down, about halfway in. There are just so many books on my shelves waiting to be read that I shouldn't allocate time and attention to something that fails to energize me.

There are certainly virtues to reading the "minor literature" of a period, the stuff that was heralded at the time but didn't stand the stern reductive force that the canon imposes over time: only a few books for any given time or place tend to command attention decades or centuries later, particularly in other lands. My Major Oral exam in my PhD program, which I designed myself (as is the custom) focused on the minor prose writers of the 1820s-1830s, people like Orest Somov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ivan Lazhechnikov and some others whose names I've forgotten. For my dissertation I read people like Panaev, Mikhailov, Askochensky and others, also largely lost to the sands of time. 

You can learn a lot about a period from these books. What were people focused on and worried about at the time? What was their concept of human nature and what -- in the author's view -- made their contemporaries the way they are? 

Moravia focuses relentlessly on fascism. How could Italy -- and individual Italians -- let themselves become Fascists. Writing in late 40s-early 50s, the palette Moravia reaches for is a mix of Proust and Faust: traumas visited on the child by fucked up parents create aberrant behaviors, guilt and a desire to be like everyone else. That's about it.

Who knows, I may go back to it. I doubt it.

Books Are Magic

In Princeton Ted recommended that we listen to the Sound Exploder podcast on our drive back to NC. Since we were indeed a little tired of our current list of podcasts and had even -- you may be shocked to hear -- squabbled a little over listening to a little too much of mine (so we listened to more of Mary's for a while), we decided to take Ted's recommendation. We listened to Lindsay Buckingham on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and the crafting of their first hit, whose words I could mumble imprecisely but right now I can't recall for the life of me what song it was. Then we listened to Lindsay and Stevie Nicks at length about the backstory of their predecessor band to Fleetwood Mac and one of the songs on their first record, which Mary had never heard and doesn't really care to hear again, but we heard about their early days and time passed as the miles of Maryland's Eastern Shore disappeared in the rearview (Google had sent us down Route 13 to Annapolis to avoid construction).

Finally all of that ended and it came time for the episode I had picked out for me: Emma Straub talking about the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. I had assumed that Straub was a member of the band, but she was in fact not but had first been Stephen Merritt's personal assistant and then traveled with band for a decade running their merch table while they toured in support of the triple album that cemented them into cultural history. Goes to show you how music connoisseurship declines once you have kids and a job.

Anyhoo, after Straub spent a decade touring with the band she published books and opened a bookstore (Books Are Magic) in Brooklyn that has become something of a thing and now has two branches, but will apparently open no more. I like that. I will need to visit it.

Not because I need books, mind you. I have a lot of them and one of the successes of my vacation was that I got rid of a couple of them, giving one to friends and leaving another in an AirBnb. I also did not stop and peruse the shelves of any of the excellent looking used book emporia in upper New England. 

I will get more books, however, in the fullness of time.

Mild overwhelm

Back in the saddle for a day with a very full list of tasks and meetings that will persist for a couple of weeks. Towards the end of yesterday we learned that our upcoming fundraiser with two well and rightly loved governors will be probably 40% larger than any we've had and has already well exceeded its seemingly ambitious fundraising target. Sadly, not too many of the attendees will be my close friends (thanks so much, guys), so this will be really a fundraiser rather than a party with friends. Hopefully there will be some food leftover and we can invite people the next night to clean up the remains, something that has evolved into a beloved tradition. I guess I just have to embrace the true fundraising aspect of it.

Meanwhile there are things I need to do out the wazoo at work. Clients to serve, notes to input, expenses to log. My new associate Amanda is off on vacation for a couple of weeks. 

To say nothing of the things that need doing around the house. And tennis that needs to be played. 

The doorbell just rang downstairs and I went to see who it was, since I saw no delivery van. It was a guy with long hair and a beard and a hardcover book in his right hand who said he was out advocating for peace on earth. I told him we supported his cause, but needed to get ready for work.

Home again

And so we have returned from our epic 3-week adventure in the north, which included:

• ~2500 miles of driving
• Sleeping in 9 different beds
• Meals with 13 different people or couples in 6 different states
• 2 instances of dodging World Cup games (including the final) using advanced knowledge of NJ infrastructure

All in all, a most successful trip, from which more stories may yet be gleaned. For today, I must focus on reentry to the land of the working, as my young associate Amanda heads off on her own two-week car trip extravaganza en famille tomorrow and I must make use of this single working day to synch up with her.

Also, it is Spirit Week and Alma Mater day at the office and I have to find something in school colors (CHHS, natch) to wear to the office.

More on the paragraph

As I often do, I brought some more serious books along with the espionage/mystery stuff with me on vacation. I started with the Ernaux I already mentioned, partially because I knew it was bite-sized and easily consumed in almost one sitting. Next on deck was Alberto Moravia's 1951 The Conformist, which I picked up used somewhere. Now that I poke about the internet a bit, I see that the book doesn't appear to have been received that well and isn't even considered to be Moravia's best, but probably survives in print because of attention brought to it by Bertolucci's 1970 film. But somebody translated it into English and it has survived so here I am, reading it. It's OK. I may come back to it later.

One noteworthy feature of the book is its rather lengthy paragraphs. I have railed a little on the prevalence of the one-sentence paragraph earlier on the blog. In Moravia paragraphs can easily run a page, a page and a half. My gut says that he displays a bias towards the long paragraph because it signals the high style and seriousness of modernism. Moravia's book is shot through with hints of Kafka and Proust if not Joyce, Faulkner and Broch, those other high priests of modernist interiority as signaled by paragraphs that at times strike the modern reader as veritably interminable.

I've also been dipping into the New Yorker archives here on vacation on my new tablet and have started reading the first 1961 Rachel Carson article that expanded into the 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson also prefers long paragraphs. Looking at them I can see obvious places where a modern editor would probably break them into new ones, on account of a shift in narratorial focus.

There are of course no hard and fast rules as to when paragraphs should begin and end. They are more or less supposed to contain units of focus or content. A bias towards longer paragraphs on the part of an author or (dare I say it) an era seems to indicate human subjects with greater integrative capabilities. To the extent that -- as many have said -- we live in an attention economy, the inability and/or wholesale disinclination to attend to things for longer hollows us out. When Our Robot Overlords finally arrive to conquer, they may discover there is nothing here to seize.

Laura Lippman

The thing about mysteries is, or rather are, that because many people enjoy reading them and many people secretly aspire to be writers, many try their hand at writing them. And there's a bit of a craft to it, a bunch of conventions to help one along. And so, it turns out, a pretty decent quantity of people get good at writing them, which makes the pleasant serendipity of finding one seemingly at random possible.

That's what happened to me with Laura Lippman. I picked up the first (for me -- Lady in the Lake, 2019) of her books at some kind of free location: maybe a little free library or in a coffee shop. I liked it well enough that I picked up a second one (What the Dead Know, 2007) in a used bookstore. I just finished that one and am delighted to have a new author I can look for in used bookstores or libraries, perhaps even a new bookstore, as there's no reason for me to wish to deny her revenue, though it seems like she is doing well enough so providing for her livelihood may be less important than supporting a used bookseller.

The Trifecta

Today I accomplished my summer vacation trifecta. On this trip I have

1. Eaten fried clams
2. Eaten a lobster roll
3. Swum in very cold mountain river water. In fact, not once but thrice in the same day

As of now I can pretty much go home now and/or devote the rest of vacation to delivering Mary to suitable photo locations and then walking back and forth getting in extra steps while Mary photographs things. Which is substantially what vacation is anyway.

But it is rare to accomplish all three in one trip.

Up in the holler, South Duxbury, VT

After a bunch of automotive adventures, some of which I may in the fullness of time recount, we find ourselves up a holler near the "town" of South Duxbury, Vermont in a little cabin. Maybe 450 square feet, all super-efficiently laid out. Really the stationary equivalent of a Winnebago/RV. As if to demonstrate this, we've already had one minor squabble about washing dishes. She was wrong, I was right.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening as we were sitting at the compact dinner table eating ravioli and an arugula salad with slivered almonds and strawberries when we heard a little bustling activity outside our window. Someone, it seemed, was trying to get into the shed in the back which holds the garbage cans and various other sundries. When I investigated it yesterday evening, the shed's doors were fasted by not one but three different latches, which clearly implied there were bears in the area.

And so, a bear. I thought I saw a black shape out there. We turned off all the lights so we could see better outside. The pathetic little flashlights on our phones were no help, but I did hear a growl.

A little chat with the AirBnb host confirmed that bears had been known the bustle about back there (hence the three locks) but that none had ever tried to get into the cabin.

Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, Mary has done an awful lot of internet research about bear attacks. She did some more. For my part, I got all traces of food out of the car out in the driveway, blasting first a little Hendrix and then (when I recalled the snacks in my tennis bag) Gang of Fours "Love like Anthrax" through our little portable speaker to keep the bears away. I returned safely.

Happening

In between mystery novels I just read through Annie Ernaux's Happening, a 2000 memoir of her 1963 abortion. 

One wouldn't think Ernaux would be as distinctive as she is. Maybe plenty of women have written unsparing narratives of their own abortions and I just haven't come across them because I'm a guy. Maybe there are others who are gimlet-eyed observers of the simple of time, changes in mores and how a storyteller can refract and embody it all.

But I don't know them. All too often the quest for distinctiveness forces authors and artists to reach for some kind of quirk instead of just being themselves on the page, canvas or whatever. Ernaux skips all that and just does what she has to do. She feels, thinks and remembers deeply and lays it out for the reader. I'll keep reading her.

If only her books were a little longer.  

Bye bye Neymar

Seeing Neymar shit-talking with the Norwegian goalkeeper before an absolutely meaningless penalty kick yesterday in the 100th minute as Brazil prepared to crash out of the World Cup was an appropriate coda to an ultimately undistinguished career. Yes he scored a lot of goals. Yes he was very talented and sometimes fun to watch. But ultimately Neymar will go down as a footnote to history, maybe the soccer version of Dominique Wilkins or Russell Westbrook: someone who was fun to watch but never really won anything.

What's worse, Neymar was the one who really popularized the weak-assed tippy toe stalling penalty kick. To my mind it's just wrong and emblematic of someone who lacks commitment. The penalty kick is for the most part an unfair contest between shooter and keeper. It should more or less always result in a goal or a sense of failure for the shooter. Neymar's PK is a net loss to the game.

His retirement from soccer is a net gain for the sport. Ponder last night. Why not let some young kid take the PK? Why not, for example, Endrick? Having a new face get the last goal would have been net prospective to Brazilian soccer. Neymar was retrospective, and going out like that tells us a lot about Brazilian soccer as a whole. They have a lot of talent -- plenty of the players out there were familiar -- but are a pale shadow of their glory days. It's a shame. But the great Brazilian teams of the 60s were kind of like the Celtics or UCLA Bruins of their day. The competition wasn't as great yet.

Blazing away, Belfast, Maine

We're at the tail end of this heat dome in Maine. We had come up here to beat the heat, which we'll be able to do starting tomorrow. It's 89 outside now and falling, but it was touching 100 as I hustled up here from Cambridge on Thursday to pick Mary up at Portland. Not so hot for NC, more than plenty hot for ME. Thankfully, our place has AC, a window unit just big enough to cool the 600 or so square feet here.

David and I played tennis in the park today. Hard courts. My feet and calves are killing me, my knee may follow suit.

Afterwards, we popped by the snack bar to survey its bill of fare, expecting hot dogs and the like. Instead, it turns out they feature such things as lobster empanadas. I had lunch for today, but we may well be back tomorrow or the next day.

77th and Amsterdam, 8:30 pm

On a blistering Tuesday evening in Manhattan Natalie and I enjoyed ice cream after a nice Omakase on Columbus. Sitting by a blacktop watching mixed gender 3X3 soccer, two other younger boys kicking ball through the older kids game. Everyone around, it seemed, had football on their mind, with France having just dispatched Sweden 3-0 in the Meadowlands earlier that evening. We were killing time while NJ Transit got done ferrying the hordes of spectators from the stadium back to Manhattan or wherever they were staying. 

Then there was an incident. An hispanic guy in his 20s(?) was laying on the ground leaning against the fence around the blacktop growling. We didn't know why. A silver-haired woman, whom I christed "the mayor" has been watching everything. She goes over and talks to him. He comes back and sits with her.

Slowly, some affluent white kids who were playing basketball or had some other incident with the hispanic guy trickle over and apologize to him. They praise his basketball skills. At last the tallest of them, a guy, also jeunesse doree, comes over and apologizes. They hug.

Amazing.

Natalie and I were primed for wonder at this moment of urban transcendence, having seen an amazing short documentary on the history of NYC, animated by Stanley Tucci, in the basement of the Museum of the City of New York. It made each of us proud to be present or past New Yorkers. Go and watch it. 

Just my luck

Headed into Manhattan on NJ Transit to see Natalie. Turns out today is one of maybe 8 days when a World Cup game is being played in the Meadowlands: France vs. Sweden in the Round of 32. NJ Transit is running a special service to get fans to and from the stadium which basically blacks out normal service before and after the match for a few hours -- or you have to pay an extra $100. To heck with that.

Thankfully Frank alerted me to this last night and I've been able to get on train before the blackout window starts. But I may have to stay out in the city for some extra time afterwards until normal service is resumed. Or take a PATH train to Newark and hope to be able to squeeze onto a train there to get back out to Princeton.

I am generally not a huge Mbappe supporter, not because he's not a great player but because he has a bad attitude and failed to carry himself well after France lost to Argentina in 2022. Moping when he should have been congratulating his teammate Messi for getting a monkey off his back, at long last.

But tonight I hope that Mbappe et al dispatch Sweden in regular time so that train service will be restored at a reasonable hour. Or that they go down in flames. But honestly France is fun to watch so I don't even mind if they win the whole thing. Great team.

Forgetting the tip

On Friday I had breakfast at the Carolina Coffee Shop with Brad. I grabbed the check since he paid it last time, but in the excitement of all the stuff we were discussing I forgot to sign it, which I realized when I was over by the Paul Green Theater because I realized I didn't have a mental image of what I had tipped. Fortunately, it being summer, I was able to pull a uey, go back and park in the middle of campus, and sidle in the back way to the Coffee Shop to fix my goof.

The server found the ticket and discovered that I had indeed not signed nor calculated a tip. I asked if it would have gone through without a signature and she said it would have, she just wouldn't have gotten a tip.* 

I have pontificated on the importance of tipping before, but the ever closer march of Our Robot Overlords (henceforth ORO) and the societal wealth dispersion they exacerbate only heightens the need for tipping.

This morning at my hotel in DC the sole server (all orders had to be placed at the bar) was momentarily terse with me and my hackles got raised for an instant. Then I recalibrated and realized there was just one of her, likely beset with many of me in the course of just about any morning. She was, moreover, a relative newcomer to our fair shores, working in a service role early in the morning. On the other side of the wealth divide. I tipped her 20% and moved on with my day.  

*As with physical checks, the signature protects the delivering financial institution against challenges.

Ode to Gioia

Right now I am making my way through Ted Gioia's piece on authenticity in music. A quick check reveals that last year at about this time I referenced him and accused him of writing the one-sentence paragraphs that litter LinkedIn and too much of Substack. That ain't happening in this piece, nor do I honestly recall why I levelled that critique of him at the time. Probably I'm just jealous.

Gioia has impressive range and has really dedicated himself to his project. I commend him for it, as if he gives a fuck. He portrays his father movingly in this piece and transitions from that into an earnest reflection on the topic of irony and authenticity, the Goofus and Gallant of contemporary discourse. I'll tell you more when I finish it.

Right now I'm gearing up to drive north for a few weeks. DC, Princeton, New York and an exurb thereof, Cambridge, Maine and Vermont. A little business on the way up, then Mary flies up for vacation. We don't even have a date fixed for our return. Really it's optimal empty-nested free wheeling. I will report from the road.