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 there craft voluminously and in public.

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 and the views were spectacular. By the time we ate it 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.