Tax $ @ work

Fabulous spot at Merchants Millpond State Park in the Great Dismal Swamp.

While sitting here a park ranger came out to get a canoe some people had rented. He looked like an oversized Boy Scout in his olive shorts and ranger shirt and was carrying a can of Sprite, which he deposited on a tree stump. On his belt he had a walkie-talkie and, to make all of us feel safer, no doubt, a handgun.

Which got me to wondering. How much does it cost us to outfit public employees with guns? The guns themselves cost some hundreds of dollars. Training employees to use them, per the internet, is not a big expense for most public safety organizations. So the biggest cost is likely legal settlements when someone gets shot in error. And paying the defense attorneys. Maybe some insurance.

Emerson's paragraphs

After years of having the book on my wish list at a certain web site that used to mostly sell books, I have begun working my way through Emerson's essays, starting with "Self-Reliance," published in 1841. For someone of our age, it is rough going, heavy-handed and tendentious. Since I am reading it first thing in the morning I can only chew off a couple of pages at a time. Then again, it might well be that my ability to read Emerson depends less on time of day than on the weightiness of his style. 

A new consensus has been driven by Substack,* Medium* and -- worst of all -- Linkedin, that modern readers have such Liliputian attention spans that they cannot process paragraphs of lengths greater than one sentence. I've probably railed against this before. So we are endlessly buffeted by lengthy but breathless enjoinders in which sentence follows sentence set off be a paragraph break. Time was, the convention was that the one-sentence paragraph was an extreme device to be called out only when the author had something super-important to say, most often in conclusion, which would stand alone on the page in a lonely sentence.

Emerson is the opposite. His paragraphs flow on endlessly, often without apparent thematic consistency. Often bold philosophical statements, even things that have risen almost to the level of aphorism over time, are jambed in there cheek to jowl with other sentences pretending to the same status. It gets pretty exhausting.

*Not to criticize the new prose platforms which are helping writers organize and even monetize their musings. Far from all writers on them fall prey to the one-sentence paragraph disease and even those that do often have some good thoughts and are fine humans. But the style grates on me.

Self care

Of late I have been feeling a bit ground down, primarily, I believe, by the relentless succession of five-day weeks, one following the other. It occurred to me that I have not had a non-holiday vacation day since we were in New England last August.

So Mary and I are taking advantage of our newfound petlessness to hie off to the beach tomorrow. We head to Kill Devil Hills tomorrow, thence to explore the Outer Banks proper, where I haven't been for many decades. I'll have a little work to do Friday and she will set off with camera and anti-snake boots to investigate some swampery nearby. 

Will report back.

The Greatest Generation of Tar Heels

Yesterday I attended the memorial service of Floyd Fried, father of my friend Dan. As has been the case with many other memorials, I was struck not just by how cool other people's parents were -- compared with my dad, whom everyone had been convinced was the greatest guy back in the day but had a lot of hair on him -- but how awesome a cohort of people the doctors of UNC's Memorial Hospital were back in the 70s. I've heard so many foundational stories of people coming to UNC and staying and having great careers and rich lives together. It makes me think about our generation's tendency to switch jobs all the time and what it has cost us in terms of long-lasting relationships with colleagues.

This was also a generation of physician-scholar-teachers who matured into their professions alongside Dean Smith, which must have been a marvelous thing to do. I am fully aware that my perception is greatly colored by the rose-tinting tendency of the memorial service when, for the most part, people are inclined to tell predominantly the best stories and maybe throw in an anecdote or two about the decedent's temper. But still. 

Also, hearing about other people's parents fills me with a little sadness that our social milieu was so much more Durham lawyers and small businesspeople than Chapel Hill professors. Such is life. 

Going Infinite

Just wrapped up Going Infinite, Michael Lewis' book on Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and FTX. To my mind, this probably falls in the bottom quartile of Lewis' books, far below The Fifth Risk, The Undoing Project, Moneyball, and of course Liar's Poker. It reads like he was hanging out with SBF, maybe to do a feature piece for Vanity Fair, as he has been wont to do, then things went pie-shaped and he happened to be in the right place at the right time, so he made a book of it. The saving grace is that even Lewis's least good books are eminently readable. I just came to the end wondering if it had been a good use of my time.

The main thrust people were taking from Lewis around the time of SBF's trial is that the kid wasn't really guilty of monumental fraud because he was so clueless. Far from being a Machiavellian figure like Madoff, he was just an eggheaded autistic kid who fucked up. Which is probably true. He was probably convicted of the wrong crimes. But he needed to be convicted of some crimes because he had been so outrageously irresponsible with OPM (other people's money). You just can't do that.

Which is why the broadly deregulatory thrust of the Trump administration's take on crypto is wrongheaded. People need to be protected from dangerous stuff by some sorts of regulations. Crypto regulation should be similar to the regulation of other investible assets. And the idea that up to 10% of any public pension (like NC's) might be allocated to crypto is batshit crazy.

My next purchase has happened

I have acquired an e-bike. I had been meaning to for some time but finally pulled the trigger.

It is definitely a joy to ride, though it seems the bike's range may be marginally less than advertised unless one really husbands the battery power, which was a bit of a surprise. It will get me where I need to go, for sure, and with a good deal less effort than an acoustic bike, but there's still a measure of range anxiety to the thing and I will have to develop discipline around charging it.

But why am I so quick with the caveats. I'm happy to have it. I hadn't bought myself a treat of any sort since I got this couch up here in my study and the matching window shades. Between the two of them they gave me a significant lifestyle upgrade back during the pandemic and they continue to bear fruit. As it were.

Also, if I ride the thing, I should be able to keep cutting my carbon footprint, which is still very important despite the momentarily toxic political atmosphere around all things Green.

The struggle with Japanese

As I push on with Japanese on Duolingo I am constantly reminded of the importance of gradualism and humility with projects like this. On a daily basis there are so many fronts on which one needs to contend: vocabulary, syntax, morphology, characters (kanji, hiragana, katakana -- not that I even fully grasp the distinctions). Each day, each session presents a struggle just to stay in one's place and hold onto what's come before, even as one presses on.  

No doubt, Duolingo is a suboptimal environment for learning a language this distant from one's native tongue. But in a very real sense Duolingo is like the e-bike, for which data shows that e-bike riders get more exercise than those who own only acoustic bikes because e-bikers ride more often. Same deal with Duolingo: the gamification features bring you back. At least they do for suckers like me.

On the back foot

The right likes to describe liberals in America these days in terms of "Trump Derangement System," and there's no doubt that we have offered Trump a very low rent quasi-permanent position in our collective psyche.

Right about now there's low volume aggression coming from the Trump administration testing the bounds of baseline civil liberties. First the arrest and disappearance of the Columbia grad student, then over the weekend a couple of raids by Homeland Security teams of dorms rooms at Columbia resulting in no arrests. Also the violent interrogation fo the German green card holder at Logan Airport.

It seems likely that Trump and team are targeting major blue state markets like New York and Boston both because they are hotbeds of prior administration "resistance" and because they can be assured of lots of media coverage. So that Trump gets maximum, outsized leverage out of relatively small and inexpensive actions. If he had tried it in Peoria, there would be fewer eyeballs on it.

It is working.

On confidence

In the last couple of weeks I've generally been playing tennis well,* especially doubles. Often doubles bring out the worst in me. I start fearing I'm going to fuck up and let my partner down and then, lo and behold, that goes and happens. Funny how that works. But when I have positive internal momentum, that also snowballs.

The fact that it means nothing to anyone else in the world whether I do well or not is kind of the point. I'm not out there exactly first and foremost to impress the world. Rather, it's to improve my self control, especially my emotional regulation. And to run around in fresh air chasing a ball like a dog and burn calories to justify the next ridiculous meal in which I indulge myself. And have some yux. And then get a good night's sleep.

In its primary self-directedness, tennis is not unlike a physical corollary to my blog.

 

*Adam did crush me mercilessly in one set of singles, admittedly. But since nobody knows about it it's OK. 

Spring Break

Some weeks ago I had looked up UNC's spring break and put it on my calendar. Last Sunday we were having dinner with Graham and he informed us that spring break had just begun, whereby I learned that I had put it on my calendar wrong.

So of course we had nothing planned, but that is not something that would likely had differed had I known the dates correctly. We've never really been big spring break travellers.

In any case, to the naked eye Graham's spring break scarcely differed from his school year. He slept as late as he could after staying up late inhaling a broad variety of content from the internet on his iPad. In the day he went to the library and did some work and also read a book. The difference is that he did this at home rather than in his apartment, slept later, and went to the Chapel Hill public library rather than the UNC library. He also ate better by virtue of being at home and the fact that we kind of upped our meal game with him at home and in the evening we watched TV together, this week Slough Horses via our semi-accidental subscription the Apple TV.

Which is all good and the apple not falling all that far from the tree. My vacations also don't differ all that much from my work. The same basic mix of reading, talking to people and getting some exercise. I just try to keep finance out of the reading, tend to be someplace other than home and hike rather than playing tennis. And that's only because Mary doesn't play tennis.

*Nb. Not long after I hit publish on the blog Graham got a call from his high school robotics team wondering if might have time to drive to North Raleigh to help their scouting team with strategy. Turned out he could. He threw on some clothes and drove up there, then later went and hung out with some high school friends who go to State in the evening. All good.

The calculus of the squeegee

As empty nesters Mary and I have both taken to showering downstairs in the old hall bathroom that Leslie and I used as kids. Because there's better water pressure there than in our shower upstairs, of course. But with Graham home for spring break and sleeping in, I am loathe to make noise in the earlyish morning so I am showering upstairs for a spell.

Another reason we shower down there is to avoid having to squeegee our shower. It used to be that we'd just squeegee the glass shower enclosure but Mary has in recent years decided that we really need to squeegee the whole danged thing so that we don't get residue buildups in the tile grouting. Sigh. It really does take a fair amount of effort to do this and frankly I'd rather pay someone every decade or so to come clean the grouting.

I am, however, married, and through the years one learns to decide which things are worth arguing about. This is not a hill worth dying on, or even spraining an ankle. So I focus instead on the movement benefits in the act of scraping the moisture off the wall: reaching for the ceiling and moving down slowly, multiple times. Squatting and turning around. Being thorough. It all very much accords with some kind of ersatz Zen practice I can conjure in my mind and thereby move through it.

The twilight of the small

Mom and I were up in Roxboro today talking to a guy who runs a grading company and is helping some developers look for buildable land up there. He said that the town was demanding full engineering proposals for sites before granting approvals and that one problem was that, since all the mom and pop engineering shops have been rolled up into larger engineering firms, it's often hard to get small jobs done for a reasonable cost.

In most cases the rolling up of entire sectors should create an opening for smaller players to come in and offer smaller jobs, it offers a toehold in a market. But it could be that the fixed costs and/or insurance it takes to stand up an engineering firm make that difficult. We shall see.

Similarly, with Dick's having basically sewn up the brick and mortar sporting goods market after the pandemic put Omega Sports out of business there are few places to try on tennis shoes. Sure I can order them from specialty tennis web sites but I can't try them on. So I am stuck wearing these goofy KSwiss things forever. Dick's only has shitty Nikes and the like. It kind of sucks.

Mass spectacle and susceptibility to authoritarianism

I went to two Carolina home games this year, something I rarely do. I've never been to a really large concert, a stadium show. In essence I'm not a crowd person. So making two trips to the Dean Dome so close together made a pretty big impression. There's definitely something fun and intoxicating about being in a large number of like-minded people, people wearing the same colors, cheering at the same time, doing litle things at the same time (raising arms on home team free throws, using strobe function on phone at certain moments in a song) supporting the same cause, however arbitrary. 

Because in our heart of hearts we all know that most fandom is silly. Yes, there are mild exceptions, and Carolina fans are fortunate to be heirs to and participants in one of them: the cult of Dean Smith, who was genuinely a good guy and a force for good. Like John Wooden at UCLA. But honestly there are lots of those. Even Krzewski is rumored to have some good features, and it's possible, though highly unlikely, that someone could make a case for Bobby Knight as a force for good in the world. But I digress.

But crowds definitely have their problems. People do a wide range of crazy shit when in the presence of and supported by like-minded others. They vote for crazy things, believe in crazy things, tear things down and occasionally kill and sunder other humans when empowered by crowds. Might spending lots of time in large crowd situations agreeing with and acting in coordination with others make one more susceptible to irrational and authoritarian influences?

Hitler spend a lot of money and effort setting up the rallies at Nuremburg and getting his troops drilled to make them look good. We spend lots of our own money.

Just sayin

Acquired on Rolex

At present I'm listening to the Acquired podcast on the history of Rolex. There is some interesting stuff in there, no doubt. Particularly about the early history of the Swiss watch industry and how Rolex built brand recognition.

But this episode goes on for five hours and much of it is just Ben and Dave gushing about watches and how this or that model is so "iconic." I have also listened to their episodes about Hermes and also LVMH and there are good lessons in all of them, but man is there a lot of flakey bullshit. More than anything listehing to grown men get all gooey about how cool these luxury products are makes me delighted to come from a university town -- and one that is not Cambridge or Palo Alto, I might add. It makes me love the Prii that we bought used, and this LG laptop here that got a good dependability rating from Consumer Reports and all the nice shirts and jackets I've picked up at thrift shops down through the years. Fuck all that luxury bullshit. It's just another way to keep you shackled to your desk.

I will add that I do appreciate the enthusiasm Ben and David bring to the research but it makes me suspect that so much of the enthusiasm derives from the intoxicating power of money. I really need to find podcasts that show similar enthusiasm for public rather than private goods.

I'm pretty sure I had a Rolex for a while in the early 80s when my dad was into watches. I'm really not sure whatever happened to it and I don't really care.

The fragmentary executive

It was with some distress that I learned that the brother (Adrian Vermeule) of a friend of mine and a prominent behavioral economist or ally thereof (Cass Sunstein) had penned an article that is serving to legitimate Trump's consolidation of power in the executive branch of the federal government. The Constitution, they argue, gives the executive broad and scarcely limited authority. Together with arch-conservative Curtis Yarvin's argument that the President should be the CEO of the country we see a lot of pieces falling into place to legitimize Trump.

The problem with the "unitary executive" or "president as CEO" argument advanced by Vermeule, Sunstein and Yarvin is that the idea of what an executive should be was pretty underdeveloped in the 18th century. We have learned in the intervening quarter of a millenium that checks on corporate executive power are all important. Thus we have corporate boards (and enhancements to them ushered in by things like Sarbanes-Oxley), capital markets, competition from other vendors, etc. Experience has shown that unchecked corporate power often brings bad results, because the strong tendency towards sociopathy observed in CEO types is a real issue. Good CEOs work with and receive counsel from the most competent and empowered direct reports they can get. Or they flame out. And give rise to things like Sarbanes-Oxley.

Overall the "intentions of the Framers" orientation in constitutional law is just foolish. I think the founding fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew the extent to which they are fetishized, though really I think that the whole thing is a straw man for holding onto power. I think the founding fathers, if they could talk, would want us to be arguing in perpetuiry about principles and how to govern best, how to mediate between the claims of individuals and society as a whole.

But at a very high level, if the founding fathers had wished for the executive to dominate the legislature, why would they have led with enumerating the powers of the legislature in Article I and then come back to the executive in Article II? Yes they limited the legislature, but they started there for a reason.

AI and historical ethics

As we soldier ever deeper into Trump 2.0, sometimes it feels like years already (and his people surely want us to feel that), I can't help to ponder the very long view of things. What we need. What we lack.

I know I have inveighed at times about the shortcomings of the technocratic super-elite and I know that I am not alone in that. Many are deeply concerned about the excess of power concentrated in the hands of the super-wealthy, especially Musk right now but to a lesser extent Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Yet we all nonetheless continue to apotheosize them and their wealth and others like them. In general money and the having of it seems too much everyon'e goal. 

But here I am barely two paragraphs in, already digressing. The even bigger problem is that if AI is going to be capable of doing so many things in the future, if it will take over so many forms of intellectual labor, how will we guide it? When push comes to shove, we need AI to be able not just to do things, but to not do things in the absence of certainty, particularly where there are ethical and moral questions involved.

All in all I think this argues that people should be studying, thinking and arguing more and more about ethical questions. In a deep way. When I was at the art of the samurai exhibit at the NC Museum of Art a month and change back with Graham and there was discussion on the little cards about the various schools of thought within Buddhism I realized I knew almost nothing about the evolution of and differences within Buddhism. I have incrementally better knowledge of the history of Islam and Judaism, and somewhat better knowledge of the history of Christianity, etc. All that goes back to college days. I've never read William James's Varieties of Religious Experience though it has been sitting on my shelf forever. 

These are important topics and we should be encouraging their study, rather than telling all our kids to learn to code or weld. Also Plato, Aristotle, all of it. Everybody should have some baseline appreciation of the complexity of ethics, though, I guess, in our own way, we all do and we all know that we will never arrive at perfect unanimity on questions of good, evil, and what is to be done next.

But will AI know that it doesn't know? Will it recognize the boundary between a practical question and an ethical one?

One of those flying dreams

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

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

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

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

Stopping in to a Cafe

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

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

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

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

AI headshot or not?

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

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

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

What are you against?

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

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

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

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

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

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

All She Was Worth

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

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

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

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

A Sense of Where You Are

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting at Indian restaurant

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

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

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

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

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

Near and far

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

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

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

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

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

Pondering all this.

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

The Mag 7 as a destroyers

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

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

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

Pilot flirting with grad student at JFK

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

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

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

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

And so on. You get the picture.

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

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

Gone soft

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

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

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

Silikonnacht

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

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

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

Lonely kid with a frisbee

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

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

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

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

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

Momentum

In recent days/nights I've made some progress towards moving to an earlier schedule: going to bed earlier, waking up earlier. Which translates into momentum along a variety of axes. I think it's because, for me at least, morning time is just inherently more productive than night time. 

I could spell it all out for you but that might get boring. Trust me.

In the early yeats of the blog I was comfortable with very short posts and felt that by just getting something up here I was fulfilling my obligation to you, dear reader. Then somehow I fell into the tyranny of the three paragraph format. I am going to try to return to the earlier modality and just do what feels right.

Musk and Ambition

Since it was short I allowed myself to watch Musk's speech at Trump's inauguration, partially to assess his Nazi salute, which did look suspiciously Aryan. His only defense is that he didn't hold it for a second or so, like Nazis were wont to do. But still, there were a wide range of things he could have done with his hands to express enthusiasm, most of them would have offended nobody. For a guy so smart in many ways, he is often a fucking idiot.

A more substantive beef with what he says came at the end, when he exhorts us all to join him in his excitement about going to Mars, to "have some ambition." OK, sure, ambition. But I am far from convinced we should share this ambition with him. I am reminded of William Shatner's comments on actually going into space after being identified for his whole life as the space adventurer Captain Kirk. He spoke of feeling profound grief upon realizing that the Earth represented life and space death.

Musk's idea of going to Mars revolves not just around the romance of it but is based on the assumption that we trash Earth. So isn't it a far nobler and much tougher goal to save the Earth? There is the environmental component to that, yes, and Musk has made huge contributions with Tesla's cars and battery tech. But there's also the diplomatic and political side of helping humans find ways to coexist. It is a much tougher challenge, to my way of thinking, then building a bunch of rockets. It is not the type of ambition prized by the imperial mind of the Tech Male, but it is in fact what we need.

Tucking in to Pepys -- Redux

Quite interestingly, I resolved after much consideration to undertake a reading of the diary of Samuel Pepys, the famed 17th century British diarist. I just searched the blog to see if and if yes, how many times, I had mentioned wanting to do this.

And what did I discover? Not only that I had mentioned this plan, but I had already been through this process back in 2007, when I borrowed a copy of Volume 1 of Pepys's diary and shared a brief reflection about it here. Back then I judged Pepys "(not) very reflective at all... Just flat out boring." 

Well, those were the observations of the 41-year old me, father of a 7-year old and a soon-to-be-4-year old, a man with less time and less of an attention span. In my second reading of Pepys, just underway, I haven't yet seen a great deal of introspection, but there's been much to learn just in the first 10 pages or so. First off, I am intrigued by just how much time Pepys and his contemporaries spend getting and distributing cash. For some reason his role means that he has to pay some soldiers, who come to the office of his employer Mountagu, for whom Pepys served as administrator/clerk. There are all kinds of cash transactions going on, lots of toing and froing. It's a huge time suck for them, and a non-trivial security risk.

Also, they seem to eat nothing but meat and sweet stuff made of dairy, such as the sack-posset offered by some neighbor, thought to help Pepys's cold.

This time I will keep reading. I had better, after all. I now own the first volume. My guess is that it gets better and that more is revealed.

The Slaughterman's Daughter

I just wrapped up The Slaughterman's Daughter, the 2015 novel by Yaniv Iczkovits which Santa got me for Christmas. What can I say, it's a very solid read, funny, humane, redolent of Gogol and surely a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. Ultimately it's very positive.

But it's rare for a novel that clocks in at 500 pages but isn't genre fiction to have as little ambition as this one. It's ultimately just pretty much a lark, even if it's pages are filled with a little death and no little human excrement and it's fully shot through with anti-semiticism presented as just a humorous fact of life in the late 19th century pale of settlement. It is more often the stuff of the 250-300 page novel.

Not that it wasn't a pleasure to read the extra pages. It's just curious almost that the publisher let the author get away with them. I guess it is just that much more enthralling than your average lark.

The demographics of lunch

Having lunch today in Carrboro with a friend who suggested we go to a "nice" place. We settled on Tandem. In a rare move much like the responsible small business person I aspire to be, I arrived 5 minutes early, I was looking across the room as I waited for him to get there. It was pretty full. At 58, we were going to be amongst the younger people lunching there.

I thought back to when I was working lunch in the same location at Aurora back in '89-'90. Lunch was much slower back then.

The difference, I realized, is that back then the Boomers ranged in age from 25 to 43 and that Chapel Hill-Carrboro had not yet developed a reputation as being a great place to retire. There were just a whole lot fewer people out lunching. And also many fewer people working from home or in the flexible work modes that the internet and smartphones make possible.

However you slice it, the people waiting tables today were making more money than I used to at lunch.

The limits of generics

For many years I have preferred generics to branded products where possible. If the products are more or less interchangeable, why should I pay for someone to advertise to me, I figured. Particularly since they can barely find me through most marketing channels.

I buy generic shampoo, toilet paper, dental floss, whatever I can think of. Even the generic Triscuit substitute from Harris Teeter held up pretty well after the pricing on Triscuits blew up because of fucking Joe Biden and his communist friends (Trump will fix it, for sure) So I was delighted to find that Walgreens offered generic razorblades that fit on Gillette-branded handles. Let's save a few bucks, I figured.

Bad idea. The generics are poorly engineered and make it harder to shave spots by my nose, for example. And they fall apart much more quickly then the branded ones when tapped against a hard surface. And so, for once, I will return my business to Proctor & Gamble, not because its marketing is better, but because its product is.

A likely story

For some time there has been wood in my backyard waiting to be split, rounds from a tree that Duke Power took down a couple of years ago in my neighbors yard. I had failed to split one of them sometime last year, and it had been sitting there in my yard for however many months waiting for me to come back to it.

Yesterday, I decided, was the day. So I went and got my maul and my wedge and started pounding the latter into the section of tree that had been just sitting there. However, far from having been made more ready to be split, sitting there exposed to the elements had made the damned thing more spongey, and my wedge quickly sunk into the decomposing wood. 

It was really no shock once I stopped to think about it. Problem was, I had done the stopping but not the thinking. I decided I was going to need to dig the wedge out by chopping away the wood around it, so I set to doing that. 

It was an interesting science project, and I made some progress exposing the wedge. Soon I was so close that I actually nicked the exposed wedge with my maul. Not great, but not fatal. Much of the wedge was exposed so I decided to see if I could pull it out. I could not, try as I might. 

I went back to chopping but felt a slight stinging sensation in my palm. A quick visual informed me that I had cut myself and was bleeding. Not profusely, but not trivially. My little adventure in wood splitting was, sadly, over for the day.

I went inside, cleaned the wound, applied direct pressure, elevated it, then put on a band-aid and made lunch. Before long Mary came home from her run and I told her of my little adventure. First thing she says is: "Was there any rust? When was your most recent tetanus shot?" Damn it, I thought, there she is again being right.

I looked online but couldn't find a record of my most recent booster.... The internet seemed to agree I needed a recent one.

Here we must back up. Soon after the election in November my cousin A -- a primary care physician in Cary -- emailed me and asked if I could ask our incoming governor if there was any way she could figure out whom to complain to about her lack of access to a database that keeps records of North Carolinians' immunizations. For some reason she couldn't access it and she was dependent on patients to update it themselves, never a good sign.

I didn't want to bother the governor so I asked his friend H, a healthcare lobbyist whose wife is a senior medical official for the state, if he knew anything about it. After a few days, he got back to me asking to be put in contact with A, he could get her access to the database. She was amazed and grateful.

So there I was on Saturday, trying to figure out how not to go to a doctor for a shot. I called A and told her about what had happed. "You need a tetanus booster less than 7 years old," she said with no hesitation, but then added though she didn't have one that all pharmacies did and this should be easily solved. Then she paused and said, "wait a minute, what's your birthday?" Then she looked me up in the immunization database and said, "you're good, your most recent booster was in November, 2021." 

I went back to reading my book.

Restart

I am slowly beginning to watch cat videos again.

Getting local news at the drug store

Not long ago I was talking to the woman at the register of the Walgreens I go to most frequently, the one at Franklin and Estes. She's an "older" (i.e. probably my age but I'm in denial) woman with a British accent and, most recently, hair died Blue. A good egge.

We were talking about small-time looting and she told me they got a lot of it. People came through, jacked stuff off the shelves and hopped on bikes to go down to fence it at the apartment complex across from University Mall. The cops, she tells me, know which apartment it is but can't really do anything about it. She has orders not to engage with the looters but she yells at them anyway.

Then just last week I was at another Walgreens, over at East 54. The woman at this register had a New England accent, Boston most likely, and she told me that she had left working at a convenience store out on Airport Road because it was too dangerous. There had been a shoot out while she was working there.

Now I will confess that I am not the most devout consumer of local news. I don't go every day to ChapelBoro.com or The Local Reporter though actually now that I look at it I see that the latter does have a section for crime, so maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention...

That most recent discovery has taken the wind out of the sails of this post a little bit. I'm glad there is at least some coverage of basic local news and it makes me happy that, for now at least, my financial column continues to be carried at The Local Reporter. Change, however, may be afoot, due to recent conversations with a certain Art Chansky. Also, I need to make time to write the column. This blog is a bit of a hungry hippo. I love it nonetheless and thank you for stopping by.

The End of an Era

I am gutted this morning. Yesterday we had to put Leon to sleep, after having to do the same to Rascal about 10 weeks ago. Yesterday at this time I was petting him. Now he is gone.

He was a darling cat, though he spent the first half of his life being super shy. Of course we could never figure out why. Up until Natalie went off to college, Graham and I were only able to pet him very rarely. Even if I tiptoed across the room towards him as lightly as I could, he'd tense up and then take evasive action. Natalie had gained his trust and he would come out at about 10pm when Mary was sitting in her chair and demand attention from her. Beyond that, he was a ghost. So much so that Graham's friend Ronen, who had hung out with Rascal plenty but never Leon, declared that Leon was a myth.

When Natalie left he realized that if he wanted attention he'd better take it where it was offered, so we developed a very good relationship. He spent a lot of time next to me on the couch being petted. Though even there he had the annoying habit of setting up on the couch six inches too far away so I had to strain a little to pet him. He very much liked being pet on the belly and would use one of his paws to hold my hand in place while this was going on, as shown in the photo below.

He also liked to sit on his sister Rascal, as shown below.

He was the softest cat ever, and he had the most expressive and graceful tail wag when someone was giving him some love. Natalie (thank God Natalie and Mary are better photo takers than I am!) has a video of it on her Instagram. Somehow I never thought to take video.

While Mary was taking him to the vet for the last time it occurred to me that we have never been together without some kind of small creature to tend to. When we got together in 1995 Mary had Story, a rambunctious mix of collie and shepherd ill-suited for residence in a West Village studio who, as a two-year old, considered it absolutely reasonable to stick his nose in for some action the very first time Mary and I kissed. In 2000 Natalie was born. In 2003 Graham joined the family. In 2009-10 we got Rascal and Leon. Mary and I have never lived all alone. 

Predictably, this changed dynamic came to a head last night in the process of fixing dinner when small sparks flew around food preparation/dishwasher-related issues. We got through it. We have learning to do. We can also go on trips now without thinking about finding somebody to stop by to do cat-related tasks.

We started the process of removing some cat-related stuff from the household yesterday, but not all of it. This weekend I will make space in the basement to store the stuff together. I am not getting rid of it just yet.

Reflections on another social booboo

A lovely night last night in Raleigh. After the Governor's inaugural ball was cancelled due to winter weather, a friend of J's threw a small party at his house and invited the core Glen Heights crew to join a bunch of Raleigh and Dartmouth folks, after which we all traipsed over to the gubernatorial mansion and had a peak around, simultaneously ooing and aahing and indulging our inner home decor critics. 

While we were still at the initial party I sat down to catch up with J's girl L -- whom I hadn't seen since a wedding in 2022 -- and we chatted for a bit. Before long I found myself touting my blog. On the one hand, who else but me is going to promote it? On the other hand, I walked away from the conversation not really having learned much at all about what was up with her.

All of which leads back to a couple of theses:
1. I do have more than a touch of the autism that runs in the family which in my case leads me to driving conversations along familiar rails which, in my case, all too often revolve around me. Which leads me to not learn as much about other people as I'd like when I talk to them.
2. Being around J, particularly in situations where we are celebrating his accomplishments, dredges up the old competitive urges from childhood, which again leads me to toot my own horn.

In any case, I ended up texting L my blog's address, so this could be easily remedied if she ends up reading my blog and then uses the phone functionality of her phone to give me a call.

The discipline and pleasure of leftovers

Inspired by Rob's sometimes seemingly obsessive but clearly principles-driven focus with not wasting food, I had amassed a small army of Tupperwares and Ziplocs at the office to grab food at the end of the day, and especially on Thursdays when there is happy hour with larger food spreads, to keep it from entering the greater waste stream without first transiting through a human. Yesterday, for the first time in months, I happened to be leaving just as the community managers were about to throw out a tray full of delicious cured meats (yes, I know, carcinogenic) and also some fruit. 

With that said, we are still working through leftovers from Christmas, including a not yet opened brie and some nuts that mom bought for a gathering at her condo. Also some juice/lemonade that we bought for Graham's New Year's Eve get-together (since he drinks neither alcohol nor carbonated beverages).

There is something that feels almost ascetic about working through this process, indeed about the ongoing practice of eating all leftovers no matter how boring, although sometimes they prove just too boring. Overall, it is amongst the deepest practices of enhancing enjoyment through deferral.

Self-Healing Clutter

In the last week or so I've been reading a book that Natalie had bought and left on the coffee table How to Keep House While Drowning, by KC Davis. Apparently it's a bestseller. It's a solid book written by a therapist which promulgates the idea that "self-care is morally neutral" and that people need to keep their houses as clean as they need to and no more. I get that. Certainly her play-by-play of what it's like to try to keep dishes clean while managing toddlers and the pressures of making timelines with them lest one miss nap time ring sublimely true and hearken back to a much earlier time in our lives which is now fully enclosed in sentimental amber but was at the time its own sort of crucible.

Then just this morning I noticed that Mary was managing her day-to-day tasks out of a small ring-binder notebook. For many years, she preferred an organizational system of a paper calendar but task lists written helter-skelter on a random, recycled pieces of loose leaf 8.5x11s which were strewn across her end of the counter like some madwoman's den. It drove me a little crazy and I advocated for some sort of little notebook or notepad like I used for task lists but she resisted with her trademark aplomb.

But now she's using a notebook. I will not make any sort of comment about it to her, because I certainly don't want to get involved in the dynamic of "winning" a spousal argument. Every such publically acknowledged victory is Pyrhhic at the absolute best. Let me say no more on that score.

No, what I need to do here is to consciously look for something to do better at that would make her happy and not make a big point of doing it.    

A Hazy Shade of Winter

We're looking at a grim week of weather here in NC, pretty sure it's the same up and down the East Coast. Frankly, we can use it. Time was, we had more of four seasons and -- as with most things -- it's only the absence of sun and warmth that allows us to appreciate their return.

I had other thoughts initially but somehow the title phrase brought me to the Bangles song, which is a little masterpiece. I had no recollection of the gauzy 30-second intro nor the fact that it was associated with the Less Than Zero film, which I never saw, just like I never read the Ellis novel. 

None of that detracts from the spareness of riff and drums, really one of the greatest of all time. And then the organ. The harmonies are maybe a little overproduced but still sumptuous. I'd love to see them do this live, maybe in a Tiny Desk or KEXP-like studio format so there wouldn't be a lot of crowd noise. 

A trip to the museum

At the recommendation of Mary and also, in absentia, Natalie, Graham and I took a trip to the NC Museum of Art today and took in a couple of temporary exhibitions that are about to fly the coop. We were not the only people to have the idea of going to the museum on a cold day, so it was rather crowded. Some thoughts:

• Venice and the Ottoman Empire. From this exhibition we learned that the two empires who were neighboring in the Eastern Mediterranean for a long time but with peaks in the 14th-17th centuries who alternately fought against and traded with one another. We also learned that people from both places as well as contemporary bourgeoisie like things that are exotic and luxurious.
• The Samurai. There was a lot of detail about the armor of the Samurai but I've never really been interested in that and I'm still not. There was a good timeline of Japanese history. The most intriguing thing was a discussion of different variants of Buddhism, a topic I know almost nothing about. It would be good to take a course on the history and development of Buddhism

Afterwards we sauntered over to the main building to check out the permanent collection, which I hadn't had a look at for a long time. It's a pretty good collection with some interesting stuff, the most compelling of which that we saw today is perhaps this painting of "The Worship of the Golden Calf" by Jan Steen.

To refresh your memory, the Jews got caught up worshipping a Golden Calf while Moses was up on the mountain picking up the 10 Commandments. It was not their most shining moment. Moreover, it sets up one of the recurring themes of the Old Testament, in which the Israelites again and again establish  hill shrines to one deity or another and then get their ass handed to them by Jahweh in a battle or a plague. It was a lesson that took a while to internalize. 

So this whole Golden Calf incident was not a high point for the Jews. But Steen makes it look not so bad here. People are dancing around, having fun. Yes you can also kind of tell that they are being a little naughty, and you can imagine some prim Dutch burghers looking at this and sensing that something is not right, but it's also not all bad. It has that Rabelaisian carnival charm. It's not unlike mercantile Renaissance porn. It's not like Brueggels or later Hogarth where the impropriety fairly flies off the canvass at you. 

Alignment against Apocalypse

Returning to the AI theme for a second, Mollick rightly points out in his book how important it will be for AIs to be fundamentally aligned in their values with us to safeguard us against the most apocalyptic scenarios envisioned by the many prophets of AI doom. I don't think he's altogether wrong.

The problem is that we humans are ourselves far from aligned in our values. Both between and within societies there's a broad gamut of opinions on the relative import of freedom and basic economic security, for example. Lots of people in the West see no contradiction between the two and think that freedom and general wealth production are highly correlated. Elsewhere in the world the link between the two seems far less clear. Even within the United States, there are plenty of people who don't see the connection and cry bullshit.

What we lack most sorely is credible leadership to build consensus. Until we get that, who the hell knows how AIs will set priorities as they keep getting smarter?