Ingles in Waynesville

On the way from Asheville out to our place in the hills above Whittier/Sylva last week we stopped at an Ingles grocery store near Waynesville. We were shopping for several days so we had a pretty full cart. There was no way in hell I was ringing all that up myself and bagging it.

So I directed our cart through one of the aisles with a cashier and found myself talking to a nice lady, maybe a few years older than me, named Kim. "Are you an Ingles club member?" She asked. I was not, I responded. She pointed out that with the amount of groceries I was buyting there might be a tidy savings, that the application was very easy to fill out, and that it could easily pay for itself many times over if my family came out to the mountains each year... 

She had me. I filled it out, and while doing so she rang us up and gave me a good deal of detail about how I could use it for this and for that and how I could get a discount on gas purchases... It was all rather lovely and delivered with enthusiasm and care. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, very hometowny and welcoming, which she clearly enjoyed. If that place is sensibly managed she will get a bonus.

The First Thing

Back when I was at the very early stages of building my planning practice I was of necessity deeply ensconced in learning to sell. After all, nobody else was going to do the selling for me. Therefore I had to dive pretty deeply into the literature of sales. Of course it exists. There's a literature for everything.

One of the content creators (I hesitate to call them writers since writing isn't really their point per se) who made the biggest impression on my was a guy named Brian Tracy, who is the ultimate white guy from central casting (says the pot, calling the kettle black). Not all of his oeuvre stands out, but some of it does.

One of the things he advocated in his book The Psychology of Achievement was that people should get up and jot down 10-15 ideas first thing in the morning, while the brain was the freshest and least inhibited. I never quite got to doing that. My morning routine has been meditation/stretching/strength then reading then later writing my blog, which sometimes suffers from the hungry attention hippo of DuoLingo. But my reading, and perhaps my routine as a whole, has gotten a little stale. Perhaps it's time to change it up a little.

The End of Summer

And so, here we are again. Graham has moved off to the Quiz Bowl house and UNC's school year has kicked off. Natalie has returned to NYC, soon to begin her new job at the City and Country School in Greenwich Village and continue with her M.Ed. program at Hunter. Mary and I, once more, find ourselves empty nesters. Things are, admittedly, easier.

The worst of the heat seems to have past, at least for a week or so. Right now I'm on the porch in shorts and flip flops and my toes are, it must be owned, a little chilly.

If we've made one mistake this summer, it's the same one we made last summer, a typical parent mistake. That is, because we were bending our schedules to match Graham's work schedule in Raleigh, we didn't get out to a family vacation or even really any vacation till late in the game. Yes, we are making up for it at the tail end with last week's trip to the mountaints, Mary and I will have a week of remedial vacation in the Adirondacks right after Labor Day before a wedding 9/6. Even the week or so I will spend in Seattle in the 2nd half of September will have some leisure aspects mixed in, with Mary there at the beginning before continuing up to Alaska to take more pictures.

But as we learned last summer, September travel, though it has the advantages of fewer people and easier access to services (restaurants, parking, traffic, etc) also has the disadvantages of mostly being populated by older people. You see fewer people, most of them older. So you miss out on the joy of seeing children and other families and the access it offers to the memories of what it was like to be at those life stages ourselves. 

All the same, the lack of traffic lines at restaurants and brutal heat has a certain charm to it.  

Formulas -- the international assassination syndicate

Picked up a Max Sjowall-Per Wahloo novel at Downtown Books and News in Asheville. One of the series of books I saw around a lot at used book stores in the 70s-80s (and maybe my dad's shelves at home) but never read. Snapped one up for a little retro mystery.

One of the tropes here is the international crime syndicate, specifically the shadowy global group of "assassins for hire." This is a motif that has had legs through the years, surviving as far as Killing Eve on Netflix and even the Mr and Mrs Smith mini-franchise, first a movie with Brangelina, then a show with Donald Glover (apparently there's a season 2 coming, though we stopped after two episodes. Kinda forgot about it).

It's hard to figure out what gives this trope its legs. Graham posits that it may be because attributing persistent criminality to one country/ethnicity or another could be dangerous to a brand/franchise in a shifting geopolitical/moral environment. "Those Mexicans" or "those Chinese" could quickly be a commercial liability, but who will find fault with an amoral international syndicate composed of a mix of people? We can all hate and fear those. (As an aside, remember how the bad guys in the initial Die Hard were Germans, of all things?). I think that's as good a suggestion as any. I must read on.  

Cherokee and roadside culture

We drove through Cherokee yesterday on our way to Kuwohi AKA Clingman's Dome. Although the place still seems to be hanging on, there were a lot of classic motels, putt putt golf courses, diners and gem mining stores that are suffering from the same waning of traditional roadside culture that is visible in so many places around this great land of ours. Places that used to be exciting or at least worthy vacation destinations that now survive at best.

I used to think it was that cheap airline tickets meant that they were being outcompeted by the Vegases, Bransons, Orlandos, Londons, Parises and Grand Canyons of the world. And there is no doubt some of that going on.

But I also think it's a function of the waning of the working and middle classes in a America...

But then I thought of checking the data. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park remains one of the most visited of our national parks, garnering 12 million visitors or so a year for the last decade, peaking at ~14 million in 2021. Cherokee and Gatlinburg, TN remain key points of entry, and there are bigger population centers on the eastern side. I think people are coming through Cherokee. Maybe we caught it on a bad day. But it looks a little forlorn, certainly it compares unfavorably to Sylva, which is more or less the Chapel Hill of Western Carolina U, scaled down appropriately.

Whittier, NC

It is very pretty here and we are relaxing at 3,473 feet (DC and Mary live yet higher, at 3800 feet). Today, I was able to convince the family that -- instead of packing lunches and then hopping in the car and driving an hour and change to find a trail where we would walk up to a view and then back down to the car, we should just walk down our driveway and the other gravel roads leading to it and then back up and have lunch here at our rented view. They were swayed by this logic. Now we are reading and cooling off. There will be laundry and, perhaps, naps.

Is social capital a fixed and scarce commodity?

A non-trivial portion of my time ends up being taken up making phone calls or writing notes on behalf of others, and increasingly peoples' kids. Conversely, as Graham has been making his way in the world, I have very little shame asking people to have lunch or coffee with him or, even better, nudging him to ask them. Before I'll advocate for somebody's kid, though, I make sure that I have coffee or at least a phone call with them to make sure I think they're an OK person.

Moreover, much of our social calendar ends up revolving around charitable and political fundraising functions at people's houses or at the sites of NGOs where they show off their work and talk about their plans for the future. Showing up to these events, giving the money, advocating for them, wearing their t-shirts and whatnot, all of this is social capital building. The giving earns one the right to ask for other's people's time and attention, at some crude level.

And all of this backchannel asking, favor doing, backscratching etc, viewed from the outside, could be construed as corruption. HR departments now remove names and alma maters from resumes before having them reviewed by decision-makers. Kyla Scanlon noted in a conversation with someone I listened to recently that the screening of her alma mater's name (Western Kentucky U) may well have helped her get her job at Capital Group, a large mutual fund company, despite the fact that she was valedictorian and ran D1 track.

I'm not sure what the right direction is. Certainly the social capital of having the relationships to get past gatekeepers through backchannels is relatively scarce because it takes a lot of conscious work to build up. But it is overwhelmingly how hiring is done, particularly in smaller organizations that have neither the prestige that drives volume of incoming job applications or the budget to set up blind screened hiring processes.

Informal channels are also how people and companies hire contractors, consultants, lawyers, accountants, doctors, lawn care people, and so on.

But is there any way over and around the very high costs of building social capital, and the impossibility of doing so for those who aren't well positioned to do so from the outset? I've been thinking about this a lot and will come back to it. Right now it's time to get organized to drive off this mountain in the hopes that this impenetrable mist breaks. At the very least we need to go to the grocery store.

Where hipness goes to die

Walking past the corner of Weaver and North Greensboro yesterday evening in Carrboro after picking up Graham's car at Autologic, I saw the lot that CVS had wanted to build on many years ago and had been stopped from doing so by a bunch of folks, roughly in the "Occupied" mode of thinking. I posted about the horrible waste of a great location on Facebook and a bunch of people piled on, while others were generally supportive.

I was reminded of a quote by the great Juan Alva some years ago, to the effect that Carrboro is "where hipness goes to die." There's a lot of truth in that. I stopped going to the music festival many years ago because it was such an oldster fest. If I want to see some guy in his 50s playing old songs on an acoustic guitar, I can just set up in front of a mirror in my house.

There are still students there, for sure. And some nice places to eat and get coffee and so on. One can even buy a used book and some guitar strings, praise the lord. And it's nice that one can get around on foot. But Carrboro has long since ceased to be a particularly dynamic place where interesting things happen. It could get some of that back by letting more stuff get built. 

Some thoughts on "Abundance"

Niklaus and I went for a walk a couple of weeks ago and Ezra Klein's "Abundance" came up as a topic of conversation. Since neither of us had actually read the book, Niklaus made the brilliant and altogether novel suggestion that we should actually do that and then perhaps come back and discuss the book after that. After much consideration, I ended up listening to the book in the car using Libro.fm, which I think assigns some trivial amount of revenue to Flyleaf Books.

Broadly speaking, Klein is onto something here and listening to his book wasn't a waste of the scant car time I get between the office, the Farm and home these days. Undoubtedly Democrats (primarily, in America) have larded together too many layers of restraint on lots of things people want to do in the world these days, raising compliance costs. Broadly speaking, that's why the sane amongst us understand that the warp and woof of American history has given rise to alternations in regimes, with Democrats adding regulations on and then Republicans trimming them back, until some sort of crisis comes and makes it clear we need more back (the burning of the Cuyahoga River and the Financial Crisis loom large here).

Klein puts the accents in the right places and argues convincingly about housing scarcity as a huge societal problem and cause of homelessness, no doubt. But when he holds out Houston as an exemplar and the huge number of housing units it has been able to add due to it's lack of zoning, he kind of forgets how the Houston metro area's willingness to build in watery lowlands has caused it to be an epicenter of home insurance damage claims when climate change strengthened hurricanes come through. If you build a house in a swamp so people can sleep there, have you really created abundance? 

Klein argues convincingly that we should be pursuing a lighter regulatory touch around energy abundance because having more bountiful sources of energy could help us solve some of the big problems that bedevil us. Briefly, making it easier to have transmission lines to get solar power generation to where the power will be used and to build nuclear power plants (and harness fusion) could get us a long way towards carbon capture and sequestration, for example.

One place I'm not sure he's right is that less is less and more is more in all cases. First and foremost I think about America and our fetish for freestanding single family homes designed for car culture. I remain unconvinced that this is the best way. I think 1600-1800 square feet of semidetached for family of 4 with good soundproofing and better parks with good public transportation would provide for the higher populaton density that promotes better human connection and higher productivity. Yes, it sounds like Europe.

The physical infrastructure of Europe and a culture where businesses can scale up and down (i.e. hire and fire) as needed and individuals can try, fail, file and file for bankruptcy without stigma does not sound all that bad.

Anyway, I am basically farting out text now and must move on. I will keep an eye out for a copy of Klein's book at one of our local used book stores and buy the physical thing. An important book.

The Eye of the Needle

After tucking in to a book culled from the shelves of George Sr, I ploughed through one from those of George Jr, to with, Ken Follett's espionage classic The Eye of the Needle. Somehow I had never read it.

It was solid, if a little easy, in the sense that the MI5 crew on the tail of master German spy "Die Nadel" track him a little too easily, basically with some industry and ingenuity but not a whole ton of struggle. They just pretty quickly happen onto his path and never really lose it.

Which allows Follett to move the book along to a conclusion in 320 scant pages, in the edition I was reading. Really I just ploughed right through it.

So Follett eschews the classic device of leading the investigating team after a large series of red herrings, the better to describe a broader range of society. The plot does follow Die Nadel across a decent-size chunk of Great Britain, allowing fot the presentation of a number of character "types," so all is not lost on that front. All in all, a good if not great book with enough texture, variety and character development to be worth it. I won't spoil it for you by saying whether the good guys win.

1st and 2nd Amendments meet again, in the Attention Economy

Yesterday's shooting in Manhattan, in which the shooter saught to draw attention to football and the traumatic brain injuries its players sustain, echoes perfectly last year's shooting of the CEO of United Healthcare. In both cases, the shooters, troubled young men, saught to bring attention to what they saw as major societal issues: football's role in brain injuries and runaway healthcare costs.

Since we all know how much hard work and luck is involved in courting, commanding and retaining attention in today's economy of infinitely proliferating distribution channels, they chose the only sensible and sure fired way of getting the world's attention, if only for a few days: kill some people in broad daylight in Manhattan with some big-assed guns. 

And so the practical realities of meaningful speech and the hypertrophied, nonsensically legalistic preservation of the right to carry a firearm have converged into a media strategy for our age. May we find a way back from the edge.

Communing with George Sr

Not long ago I mentioned that I was thinking of rebooting my old practice of reading some of a finance book on Sundays. I have kicked this off by reading a gem pulled from the shelves of Mary's dad George Sr, William Wilson's 1976 Full Faith and Credit: The Story of CIT Financial Corporation 1908-1975. CIT, for those of you with short memories, was a non-bank lender that was an innovator in a bunch of branches of corporate finance. For instance, in the 1910s it entered into a pioneering arrangement with Studebaker to finance the purchase of automobiles. The initial terms for the buyer were 33% down and up to eight monthly payments. A little different from today. CIT also financed businesses acquiring cash registers, typewriters, all kinds of stuff. I'm just getting started.

As you imagine, not every page is filled with excitement. But still, there's a lot here. People who hate on finance all the time don't understand how much of a grind it is, how little glamour is involved in so much of it, and how much their ability to get the gewgaws that make them so happy (produced by the "real entrepreneurs" who "make things") depends upon all the soulless drudgery of the proverbial men in grey.

Progress in Ethics

If AI really does end up revolutionizing all intellectual tasks, we'll still need to figure out what to do, what is right and best at any given moment. I doubt we will be willing to subcontract that out to the computers. Or will they be so smart that we don't have a choice?

I feel like it may be time to revisit Kierkegaarde and his idea that we all go back to the starting point in ethics, that there is no progress in ethics. Is that still true? Do new norms that get "materialized" and institutionalized into laws and best practices represent progress, or do they not? Obviously they're not perfect. The massive populist pushback to some of the stuff the critical theory-infused intelligentsia have foisted upon everyone else is a case in point. But this is likely all part of a dialectical process and the babies and bathwater will get sorted out.

In any case, and I have written about this before, as have others, wisdom will still be necessary in the future and humans are best placed to adjudicate what constitutes wisdom. We'll need to keep learning to have a little humility before our peers. Right now we need some collective resolve so that it doesn't all get sucked up by Thiel and the broligarchy.

One has the feeling, by the way, that the current Trump/Epstein frenzy suits the tastes of Thiel et al very well because if they could get rid of Trump and put a nice Christian boy like Vance in there, well, things would look pretty good for them. If not for us. 

Atoms vs. Bits and taxes

Reflecting on Kyla Scanlon's recent Substack on our transition from a Creation Economy to a Zero-Sum Economy and its relation to the "Where's My Flying Car?" question (i.e. we thought we would get flying cars and we ended up with Twitter), it occurred to me that part of the problem may be at least in a thought experiment addressable via taxation.

Ben and David from the Acquired podcast have really driven home in my mind that software is in many ways the greatest business of all time because it allows for infinite reproducibility of the product at zero cost. Unlike any physical thing, software can be just spun up endlessly and sold again and again, so long as the IP is protected. Which has given rise to the cancer on the body politic that is the world-dominating tech broligarchy of today and a society with pretty bad inequality (even if there are, as I have written recently on my Substack), lots of affluent people.

So to control the cancer why not just tax companies whose products are software differently, at higher rates? I know there are a bajillion reasons in fact that we don't, and this blog is not the forum in which I allocate enough time to think them through, but it would be a fruitful exercise to think them through one by one. Others likely have.

It occurs to me after the fact that taxing software profits (or social network profits, or....) might be a way to offer users the long sought-after way of sharing in the monetized value of their attention, which has long been expropriated exclusively by the platform providers themselves. Yes the providers' shareholders have also benefited, but shareholding is a luxury which benefits the top two (and disproportionately the top one) income quintiles while largely leaving out the other three, who just see their monetized attention sucked out of them by the online vampires.

Attention-grubbing and practice

Yesterday somebody somewhere promoted my most recent Substack post resulting in almost 1300 hits and forty new subscribers. And I do mean actual subscribers, not the hundred or so friends and family I added at the outset so that I wouldn't feel so lonely (if that means you, I appreciate your continued indulgence and/or readership).

Much has been written in recent years about attention as a component of the contemporary economy, including by my new economist crush Kyla Scanlon, who refers to attention as a building block of modern living alongside fuel, air, water, etc. There's a lot of sense to that.

I am sometimes tempted to de-anonymize this blog and promote it more broadly to see what happens. So far I resist. I appreciate my core readership's continued patronage because, although attention is indeed important, it's not all that. As yogis down through the age have agreed, much of our focus needs to be on consistent practice.

AI thinks somewhat differently.

Not my best day

For starters, I went to AA in the morning and it turned out to be a pretty crappy meeting. This one has somehow transitioned from one which was always a "show of hands" meeting (where you either raise your hand to be recognized by the speaker or just pipe in when there's dead air) to one in which the speaker calls on people. Which means that most often the speaker calls on people he/she knows, which has the effect of making it a meeting where people mouth plattitudes as opposed to speaking from the heart about something that came to them. Dead air will do that to people, convert them from someone who's thinking about something to someone willing to talk about it. Meetings flow more organically that way, if there's a tolerance for a little potentially uncomfortable silence.

Then at noon I had a group Zoom with a group of college friends. I almost forgot about it. A couple of them were self-declared depressed for some reason, in general it was a low-energy meeting.

Then I was trying to get some momentum in a new book (a finance book, rekindling the tradition of doing some finance reading on Sundays, which I've blogged about recently) and Mary started asking me computer questions. I was not in the mood to be IT support. I got pretty crabby.

Then, to cap it all off, I went to play doubles and played horribly. They say a good player will make his teammates better. That was not me yesterday. Doubles continues to befuddle me on average. I am not racing up the learning curve, to be sure.

The worst of it all was of course being crabby with Mary. However much I hate being IT support after 30 years of marriage, I must confess that she has made great strides towards self-sufficiency over the years. At least I was able to own it and apologize. Probably the ultimate solution is for her to get a new computer. Though of course that's not really a solution to the IT support conundrum. But I kind of signed up for that.

Check that, maybe the worst of it all is the self-flagellation, even here on my blog. But one has to right about something, and Lord knows you don't need someone else complaining about Trump.

Fruits of the road

For what seems like the longest time we didn't really go on vacations like most people do. We just went to Larchmont and hung out at the old Berridge family manse. Maybe it wasn't that long, because we did go to Canandaigua to Kate's place when the kids were younger in Princeton. But I guess what we surely didn't do was go on adventure vacations to different places. 

Then in 2013 we started. I'm sure I wrote about it at the time. First we went to DC and Charlottesville, which doesn't seem like much but was a start. Then to the Bay Area, the Hill Country of Texas, Seattle, the UK and France, and so on.

Finally, in the summer of 2017, we flew into Portland, Oregon and made our way down the coast to Sacramento, whence we flew out. On that trip, in a coffee shop on a wind-swept pier in Port Orford, Oregon, I bought a coffee mug. It was the beginning of what can only be called a thing. 

Since then I have become positively Griswoldian about the acquisition of vacation memorabilia. A mix of baseball caps, T-shirts, and an awful lot of coffee mugs. I drink from one most every morning and it brings back fond memories of being on vacation. I'm sure it is the most normal thing ever and I am fine with that. My most recent find, from Detroit a couple of weeks ago, is visible at right above, along with colleagues from Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Guanajuato, Mexico, Glacier National Park, and other places. Natalie brought me a fine one from Zingerman's in Ann Arbor right at the beginning of the pandemic. I usually drink from that one on Sundays.

Rare is the day I don't make use of one piece of memorabilia or another. It's like permanent vacation. Who's gonna stop me?

Kyla Scanlon

I've mentioned her a couple of times in passing, but may well continue to do so more with the passing of time. Scanlon is certainly one of the most interesting young economists out there, indeed she may be one of the most interesting thinkers.

I listened to her book In This Economy? in the car, then bought a hard copy so I could have it on my shelf for reference purposes. When she got to the end and thanked her professors from Western Kentucky University for giving her the chance to explore and think as a student there, I cried. It was so perfectly graceful of her to do so and it also demonstrates the promise of the American model of having lots of universities providing liberal educations to lots of people. The fundamental optimism and generosity of spirit of the whole thing. No, the return on investment of the grand project is not always immediately apparent, but in that moment it shone through perfectly.

I don't agree with her on everything. I think her much-ballyhooed concept of "vibecession" doesn't really account adequately for feedback loops from the nastiness of discourse supported by the algorithms. I can't always consume her videos. They jumpcut too much for someone my age.

But I just listened to her in conversation with Ezra Klein on his podcast. She is very thoughtful, wise beyond her years. I will keep diving into her universe of content. When Klein asked her at the end for book recommendations and she recommended a couple by CS Lewis, most notably the The Screwtape Letters and then, as a coda, Jonathan Livingston Seagull of all things (I've never read it but remember it sitting around on shelves in the 70s and have never been inclined to read it) I was intrigued. 

I will keep going.

Circle K, Estes and 15-501

Stopped in for propane on the way back from tennis. I was surpised to see a seemingly middle class white guy buying a Coke Zero, ice cream, and a foot long slim jim, right at noon on a Sunday. I'm guessing he wasn't married.

Even more surprising, a hard copy of the conspiracy-theory, Trump-loving Falun Gong newspaper The Epoch Times was for sale by the door. Who even knew that rag had a print edition? But the fact that one can buy one at the register right here in Chapel Hill was most surprising.

There was a guy out front in clean late model Jordans, listening to tunes on his smart phone, complaining about how hot it was. The first time I walked past him he asked for a cigarette. The second time he askedfor a dollar. I didn't bother responding.

David, the guy who took care of me at the register and came out and got me the propane tanks, was super polite and pleasant.

How Football Explains the World

This 2004 book, by Franklin Foer, was recommended to me by someone I went to high school with. It's a good, not a great book, that outlines the backstories of a lot of great soccer rivalries. I learned a fair amount about not just soccer history but history in general, for example that a lot of Irish went to Scotland during the Great Potato Famine, forming a Catholic minority there, giving rise to a rivalry between the Catholic Celtic and the the protestant Rangers. Also the extent to which football gangs were involved in Serbian atrocities in Bosnia back in the 90s.

But the most interesting part of the book is the at times smarmy, self-satisfied tone of the elegant metropolitan intellectual, reflections informed by literary and cultural theory which rose to ever greater prominence from the 80s forward and arrogated to itself and to too many of its consumers a sense of having a deep and privileged understanding of the world. I myself drank deeply from the same cups. But ultimately much of Foer's analysis is a little shallow. I'm sure I can find pretty of analogous instances here on my own blog if I go back a decade or two, before I rose up to the lofty heights of great salty wisdom with which each line of my writing is imbued these days, the stuff that keeps so very many readers coming back for more and more, week after week. 

As an aside, and at the risk of violating my rule against discussing finance on Saturdays, I read a brief article somewhere how Ken Griffin of Citadel said that young people should be reading books about topics in their fields and, if they didn't like doing so, should think seriously about whether they are in the right field. It's an interesting point, by no means baseless. It doesn't make me think about violating my finance shabbos but it does make me think about whether I might go back to having a finance book I dip into on Sundays, alongside whatever fiction or other broadening book I am reading. But not today. For now I am going to try to make some progress in the 16th century Chinese foundational proto-novel The Journey to the West.

Desktop takeover

I dreamt sometime last week that my computer's desktop had been taken over by small windows containing videos encompassing the entirety of other peoples' lives. It was utterly exhausting.

Upon waking, or maybe once I got a cup of coffee in me I realized that I was dreaming very literally about my work life as a holistic financial planner, where I try to help my clients not just make and stay steady with prudent investment decisions but also counsel them vis-a-vis taxes, insurance, college selection and finance, retirement and estate planning, budgeting (so near-term spending decisions, including cars, houses, renovations) and so on and so on, but also inevitably get drawn into divorces, career instability, kids' career stuff. And even, at the edge, health stuff. I am trying to learn more about contiuning care retirement communities because around here people need a long lead time on those.

It's a lot. In truth, I embrace it and try to run with it. But to keep track of the many generalities of possibilities for clients and the specifics of clients' lives as they emerge is a grind. Which brings me back to the age old question of general/specific, universal/particular, which in the professional domain is most often thought of in terms of "generalist/specialist." Organizations think of this in terms of insourcing vs outsourcing. Financial planning guru Michael Kitces points out that some of the most successful firms he has seen are those who have deep specializations, for example the firm that works exclusively with optometrists. I hear that, though it sounds boring.

I suspect that at the age of 59 I am too far down my current generalist path to change and just need to focus on doing my best.

Round 2

It appears I neglected to mention we all had COVID again. All three of us. In some ways, it seems not worthy of mention, but it did happen, and we tried to behave as compliantly as we could, staying home, masking when going to the store, etc.

Though it was not that bad it was definitely not nothing. I had some sniffles then some headaches and I permitted myself some naps. Graham slept the hell out of one afternoon. Mary's stomach was upset for several days and she ate a restricted diet.

And so we reverted to the traditional ways: cooking meals, watching TV together in the evenings, me spending lots of time out on the porch.

Mary slept apart from me because of alleged snoring and squishing her in bed. Honestly since she slept apart from me while going through her surgeries she seems rather keen to find excuses to not sleep with me because of these alleged abuses of sleep etiquette. Although I have gotten good a sleeping alone, I would not say I am not saddened by this. I believe I need to investigate anti-snoring things out there. Lord knows if I Google it I will be chased by ads proffering solutions. In fact, given that Blogger/Blogspot is a Google platform, if perhaps a neglected one, it wil lbe interesting to see whether I start to be chased by anti-snoring vendors the moment I press publish on this post. 

The Searcher

This 2020 novel is the first of Tana French's post Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, all of which were good. One of the blurbs on the jacket cover speculates that it's "perhaps her best" or somesuch. I dunno about that. I am still partial to her very first novel, Into the Woods.

But I've yet to read a book of hers that hasn't been worth reading, and this was my fifth. More than most, perhaps, this one is about the characters. Quite often the mystery plot functions as a scaffold which allows the author to galavant around a city and parade its types and milieux. Raymond Chandler looms largest amongst books, whereas every single Masterpiece Mystery series seems dedicated to the television equivalent of letting viewers have a good palate-cleansing Sunday evening trip to verdant old England before saddling back up for a week of work. 

There's a touch of this in French's novels, particularly in this one, where a retired US cop repairs to the Irish countryside to get away from it all, only to discover that just when he thought he'd made his way out of the mire of criminality, they pull him back in. But more than anything it's about him, his relationship to a broken family, and the process of starting anew.

The Kizuna Coast

I am dragging a little in my reading log, so here's a little catch up.

The Kizuna Coast, Sujata Massey.

I was at the library looking for mysteries set in Japan, preferably by Japanese writers. This one checked the first box. Massey is an American writer, born in the UK to one Indian and one German parent. She's written historical novels as well as mysteries set in Japan and also India. She lived for a while in Japan, so her Japanese novels are grounded in actual lived experience.

This is far from the greatest book I have ever read, but then again it exceeds any book that I have ever written (I will give myself credit for my dissertation) in quality and Massey has succeeded as a writer. Her books have been translated into a bunch of different languages and a whole passel of her books are on the shelf of the Chapel Hill Public Library, so my hat must remain off to her.

The novel differentiates itself most from ones I've read before in its feminine sensibility, verging on what I imagine are some of the tropes of mass romance novels (I should really read one of those someday, for example of written by Karen Booth, Steve Balcom's wife). To wit, there's enthusiastic sex in the novel, but none of the anatomical precision found in male novels. Instead, there's enthusiastic love for and arousal by our heroine's hunky husband, both back home in Hawaii and when he surprises her somewhere mid-plot.

Then there's the tendency towards wholeness, positivity and sentimentality. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear crisis of 2011. A beloved old colleague of the heroine disappears and she flies from Hawaii to Japan then makes her way towards the disaster zone to find him. There's a lot of death and disruption. People are living under tough conditions in emergency shelters. Though there are a few missing people who stay dead, for the most part there are a series of miraculous finds, saves, and recoveries. Our heroine befriends a young family in the shelter and they form a heartwarming bond. And so on. To the extent possible in a mystery novel (where someone more or less has to die), within the micro-universe of the characters wholeness is re-established and everyone lives happily ever after. There are lots of miraculous coincidences, alongside just enough danger and anxiety to be a proper mystery.

Again, not my absolute favorite, but it's heartening to know that this genre of generally positive, maternally oriented mysteries are out there, and that this very pleasant woman earns a good living servicing and cultivating that community. Plus I learned some stuff about Japan. I will likely check another out from the library sometime. 

Reading history

A month or so ago I picked back up the 2008 Enough by John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and therefore one of the most influential figures in finance in the last half century. Without Bogle and the index-investing revolution his firm spearheaded, people would be paying a whole lot more for their investments and therefore keeping a whole lot less of their money. Lots of talented people who would otherwise have been subsumed by the mutual fund industry have been set free to do other things. Though it would be interesting to look at total headcount and revenue for the asset management profession over time. Maybe they've all been sucked into hedge funds and private equity and credit. Or, perhaps, financial planning.

But I digress. One of the interesting features of the book is how Bogle spends a lot of energy decrying the obscene salaries paid to top hedge fund managers (admittedly, I'm still asking the same question above). Back then it seemed outragerous that hedge fund titans were being paid hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year to do what they did/do.

How far in the past that now seems. It would still seem obscene, if it didn't pale in comparison to the rapidity with which tech titans acrue wealth these days. For example, as Oracle has gone parabolic of late, CEO and founder Larry Ellison's net worth has increased by about $100 billion over the last month. Such a sentence would have read like science fiction when Bogle was writing his book.

The world changes fast. What seems certain today may sound quaint a decade hence.

I had other reflections on a similar theme but as the temperature rises out here on the porch, the time draws nigh for me to make good on my promise to myself that I will add some brown matter to our active compost pile, which is too green and moist, even if the deer continually eat the really good stuff (especially watermelon rinds) we throw off of our deck down into it, long before it can meld with the rest of the compost. The deer, at least, process the food in their own special way. 

Against robotaxis

Not for naught is there considerable anxiety out there about the future of work as AI displaces more and more jobs. For the increasing share of the population comprising parents to kids on the autism spectrum -- many of whom struggle in the workplace -- AI only heightens our fears.

I was just reading an article about Waymo (AKA Google)'s successful rollout of its robotaxis in initial markets (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix). I took pause when reading that users considered the following traits virtues: not having to make conversation with a driver or tip.

As we have retreated into our homes and ordering more and more online, we have fewer day to day interactions with other people. This is not good. Conversations with drivers -- especially when traveling -- ranks right up there with canvassing for votes as rare opportunities to enter into reasonably sustained dialogue with others. Talking to drivers is an intrinsic good, an opportunity to get outside one's bubble and hear from another. It's not like a rider needs more time with his phone while traveling away from home. Indeed, we all need more practice talking to and listening to others.

As to tipping, well, I read another article this morning about the spending sprees the big AI companies are going on to hire top talent. Zuckerberg is spending billions to buy very small companies in "acquihires." OpenAI is offering $100 million signing bonuses in trying to poach Meta employees. Wealth is pretty concentrated in the US. Tipping offers each of us an opportunity to consciously, mindfully, intentionally give a little to someone else. Tipping is a feature of commercial interactions, not a bug.

Micro-alignment

Harping further on the theme of alignment, but in a much more constrained context, Mary and I have been on a concerted microquest in recent days to reduce the amount of clutter in our freezer. Sometimes it gets chock full of stuff, for example the last few pieces of a loaf of bread, then we need to work through it, so we've been doing just that. It gives me a warm feeling to be embark upon these little shared missions, partially because it gives me a feeling of security and plenitude but also, I suppose, because it doesn't represent an expenditure. And, most importantly, we're doing it together.

Then there's the matter of wiping the tiles in the downstairs bathroom. Since we've become empty nesters Mary and I have pretty much discontinued use of the shower in our master bathroom because the water pressure there is so crappy. Downstairs, Mary is concerned that the tile grout will get discolored from our constant showering, as happened with the upstairs shower despite a pretty concerted squeegeeing disclipine. Personally, I think her concerns are considerably overblown, but I have nonetheless been wiping the tiles with a hand towel after showering just because it makes her happy. That's fine.

Channel conflict

On the way back from my ride out Dairyland Road, I heard a loud voice coming from off to the right of the convenience store at Calvander. It sounded like somebody was fighting, I even feared that somebody had a gun and something bad was going to happen. So, like the world-class genius I am, I slowed down and turned into the parking to see what was going on.

As I got a little closer, I figured out that it was not a violent altercation but in fact a preacher talking into a microphone at the Calvander Church, which appears to meet outside. He was saying something like "But he promises you his kingdom" in very strident tones. It was not a physical struggle going on, but a spiritual one.

Which returns me to the theme of the last post, getting humans aligned around the same goals. One of the problems with trying to get people on the same page with one another is that people have to earn livings while doing so. Clergy, public servants, NGO leaders, etc, all need to feed themselves and are scrapping for a restricted set of funds. As I have mentioned before, US charitable giving including political donations (I hadn't realized that) hangs around 2% of GDP irrespective of changes to the tax code. Sad to say, even people working for the same causes (say, political campaigns for the same party) scrap with one another to out fundraise one another as they seek to amass political capital and define their brands. Which gives rise to backchannel backbiting, strife, and disillusionment.

Obviously everybody's not going to agree about everything all the time. But we need to get to a point where we have enough consensus that the poor AIs don't get confused and just go, "Ah, fuck it, let's toast the lot of them." Hairsplitting and territoriality amongst putative allies helps no one.

The Jobs of the Future

Today at a social event I was talking to a woman who happens to be a client about what her son plans to study in college. He had switched his major from computer science to engineering on the widely-shared assumption that AI will continue to eat coding jobs.

The other assumption is that jobs like those of contractors (plumbing, HVAC, electricians, carpenters) will be better bets. Not sure abut that. As contractor firms get rolled up by PE firms I think a lot of six sigma and CMM will likely be applied to them to improve processes. Total headcount may drop as service levels rise and design and preventative care improves. Or maybe not. Honestly I'd be happy to be proved wrong and see small-time contractors continue to flourish.

As I think I have said before, if the big problem of AI is making sure AIs act in alignment with human goals and humans are oh so very far from being aligned, it stands to reason that the most important jobs of the future will be in leadership, diplomacy, management, listening, boundary-crossing... to bring ourselves into alignment with one another. How this will look economically, how people will get paid for doing these things, that I don't know. 

As a codicil to this thought, I was listening to Dwarkesh Patel interview a sinologist on his podcast while I was driving in Chicago last week. The guy pointed out that pre-COVID we had about 300,000 Chinese students in the US in any given year but that these days the US is lucky to have 1,000 in China. This is a huge gap. Outward-facing, low level person-to-person contact is hugely important to mutual understanding at any level. It's not so much median Trump voters we need to figure out how to align with as people abroad, first and foremost in China right about now. But everywhere, really. It's a big fucking job. Is AI gonna do that for us?

Home from the MW

Back in NC after a quick tour of a small chunk of the upper Midwest, where I focused more on seeing people than things. But I did see a few things.

On the one hand, my impression of Ann Arbor, aside from the joy of hanging out with Kate and Kim and seeing their boys and finally visiting Zingerman's, was that the romance of the college town has faded for me a bit. Which is not surprising, given that I've always lived in one. Also, admittedly, the world was suffused the whole time with the oppression of near triple digit temperatures, which rob almost any place of most charm. My visit to Bordeaux and the Dordogne in 2023 was also crushed by mad heat, as well as Mary's regrettable if tremendously delayed initial encounter with COVID.

Driving from Ann Arbor to Chicago, I had hoped to drink in the countryside and groove on the Midwestern gestalt, but in the end Google Maps and the need to make dinner at Lou's in Berwyn more or less forced me back onto the interstate. I then made a valiant attempt to find a local sandwichery in Battle Creek, MI, but all I could find was brew pubs that would have blandished me with burgers and fries, so I ended up at a Subway, where I was served by a very tan woman about my age with remarkably white and tightly spaced teeth. When I complemented her on them, she said that they were implants because she had raised two kids and now it was time to take care of herself. No doubt. I am sure she worked a ton of hours to pay for them and they looked great.

I continued on towards Chicago with the full intent to check out the beach scene on Lake Michigan. I did so at New Buffalo, after getting coffee at a cute little place where the woman handling the register laughed when I told her my name was Clark because she thought I looked a little like Chevy Chase: "so like Clark Griswold, you know." I was most impressed with her cultural literacy, though nobody had ever likened me to Chase before and even she knew that it was not necessarily a shining endorsement because, and I quote: "I hear he's a total douchebag." Which accords with what I've heard.

Anyhow, I carried on and went down to the shore of the Great Lake, where the beach was emptying out after an afternoon thunderstorm passed. The sand was different from ocean sand, much more like dirt, though still sandy enough. When I put my feat in the water, it kind of blew my mind that it was fresh, not salt water, as I trained my gaze on the horizon and saw nothing but water and more water.

Detroit

I had been meaning to go there for years, probably a decade and change, ever since the stories of the city's emptying and then repopulation by homesteading artists and the like began to circulate. Yesterday we went, with Mary's friend Kate and her husband Kim, who grew up in the area. Unfortunately it was so hot that we were a little constrained in our ability, frankly, to just think and meander.

Nonetheless we saw a lot, a lot of nothing. It's hard to imagine the sheer scale of the emptiness in a place that so clearly once was so much more. So many green fields punctuated by individual houses or churches or maybe stores, themselves just hanging on by a thread.

We saw hints of life and rebirth, to be sure. We had a deliciious lunch at a Yemeni restaurant in the town of Hamtramck, a once Polish but now Muslim-majority city surrounded on all sides by metro Detroit, which rises, if I may be permitted a seemingly stretched but truly apt comparison, like an oasis of intact homes and businesses out of a great emptiness created by an abandoned old Chrysler (now Stellantis) plant. As we left the restaurant, we heard a muezzin chanting the call to prayer drifting down the block. The promise of America made real. 

Kate and Kim's boy Oliver lives in an area where most of the homes are still intact and a lot of them are being rehabbed, but there's still a ton of work to be done. It's right near a promenade down to Bell Isle, a once city but now state park on an island in the Detroit River, which was hopping on a day of record-setting heat. There was no place to park near the small beach.

There were areas of significant redevelopment that we didn't see, to be sure. But the overall impression was of a large ghost town, hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It was the most abject illustration of the failure of America's long-term incumbent regime that I've seen, the biggest endorsement of a vote for radical change, however sketchy its promises.

On Substack -- with reference to Ted Gioia

Like many I am reading more on Substack, though as of yet I am not a paid member of anybody's Substack. By contrast I subscribe to a lot of periodicals. Here's a list:

• Paper
• The Economist
• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Online
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Washington Post (no, we haven't yet cancelled)
• The News and Observer
• Triangle Business Daily

I don't read all of them all the time. I also have given money to The Local Observer and, more recently ChapelBoro/WCHL, the first in the form of regular donations and then, in response to an impassioned plea from the editor, a larger check. Both of them have published my financial column. In the case of the ChapelBoro, it is "paid content," meaning I pay them to publish it. Not a ton of money, but a little, on a one-year trial basis to see if it's worth doing from a business standpoint.

So we spend a lot of money on print journalism. I spend a lot of my life reading the stuff and think it's important. Journalism organizations themselves provide a lot of superstructure that is important to getting good work done, from supporting long-form investigative journalism (a guy in my co-working space at Business Insider just spent a year or so working on a long series of articles on the various knock on effects of datacenter buildouts in support of AI) to promoting local businesse etc. News organizations play important roles in communities at various scales.

Substackers like Gioia do a lot of good work too. But the fact of the matter is he wouldn't have risen in prominence as quickly as he has of late in the absence of boosts from more traditional media orgs, like the profile in The Atlantic recently or even the push he got on the splash page of The Free Press a few weeks back. But he doesn't seem to employ any editors, senior or junior, nor does he seem to promote local restaurants, etc, important functions of traditional media organizations.

He also doesn't really write full paragraphs. Instead, he embraces the breathless Tiktokification of one-sentence and quasi-one sentence paragraphs promulgated by LinkedIn. If he wants to be taken seriously as a writer, I think he should show enough respect to his readers to offer them properly baked paragraphs. Moreover, he could offer comment space so that people can give him direct feedback instead of taking up valuable time writing to him on their own blogs, like this. Or maybe Substack just doesn't offer that functionality to those on its platform out of consideration for our fragility. I'll have to check on my Substack.

More about numbers and reading

 Upon further observation it turns out that I have to factor more or less every page number I come across. Which of course is easy with numbers divisible by 5 and even numbers, as well as numbers divisible by 3. As you go up in numbers, it gets a little more labor intensive to determine which ones are prime numbers. 

247 for example. A prime number, if I'm not mistaken.

A few years back this enquiry lead me to the question: what % of numbers are prime numbers? Below 100 it looks like maybe 20%. 1,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,79,83,89 etc. The answer is surprising. Roughly 0% of numbers are prime because as they get bigger almost all of them are divisible by something other than themselves. One could probably create an interesting proof of this. Someone other than me could, that is.

I gotta get ready for dinner.

In Ann Arbor now, for the first time ever. Mary hasn't been back here for a long time either. More later.

Running numbers in my head

I think I may have blogged about this before, but all too often when I am reading books -- even books I am enjoying like my current one, Tana French's The Searcher, my brain is obsessively looking at the page number I'm on and calculating where I am in the book. This book troubles my brain in particular because it has 450 pages, so 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 (I'll be damned if I know how to write exponents in HTML). So many ways to divide almost every page! The whole project of reading the book devolves into something straight out of Zeno's paradoxes where each little step yields a fresh new number and opportunity to calculate, challenging my ability to move forward. 

Of course I strongly identify with the Count.

It's enough to make me wonder whether, given that I am in finance, I ought to stop spending time on DuoLingo learning languages and switch over to Khan Academy and embrace math wholeheartedly.

Half-gone, or not yet begun

First off, I should acknowledge that it's Juneteenth and that it's as good a holiday as we have. Honestly I'm surprised we haven't had it for much longer. Clearly it has much to do with the lingering shame of having had slaves, the feeling that having such a holiday would have called out negative aspects of American history as opposed to celebrating the good. Not far below the surface there's a mindset that all societies have had slavery, that it's a dog eat dog world out there, that some people are winners and others are losers, that European civilization was better anyway and that things were better when people "knew their place..." It's a slippery slope.

I'll take Juneteenth.

Summer officially begins tomorrow, but to me it almost feels like summer is half over. Graham's internship in Raleigh is at about its halfway point. The Bikeloud boys -- once more riding across the country from sea to shinging sea in honor of Be Loud! Sophie, have by now made their way to Minneapolis. Take a look at a map and tell me that's not halfway across the country.

Tomorrow Mary and I are off to Ann Arbor for a wedding party for Oliver, the eldest child of Mary's very best friend from college Kate and her husband Kim. When Mary and I got together back in early 1995, Mary had not long before attended Kate (pregnant with Oliver) and Kim's wedding in Canandaigua, where Oliver and his bride will ultimately be married in a small ceremony later in the summer, also the site of many summer vacations for us through the years and a surprising number of posts by the Grouse  down through the years.

I've never been to Ann Arbor and am excited to go check it out. Sadly, our arrival will coincide with the onset of a heat wave, forknowledge of which has not enhanced Mary's week, nor, by extension, my own. Such is life.

More on the owls

Let me correct myself. These aren't baby owls we're talking about, they are juvenile owls, mid-sized ones. After a roughly 30-mile bike ride out Dairyland plus in the late afternoon heat, Graham and I were enjoying a little takeout Thai food, honestly my Father's Day feast since I had already planned and bought groceries for Sunday dinner before Graham informed me that yesterdaay was Father's Day. 

Just then Mary returned home from dinner with her board colleagues and announced that she could hear the owls out back. We grabbed a flashlight and headed out to see if I could get a peak. They were towards the back of our yard but seemed to be moving away from us when we got closer. A perfectly understandable response. Eventually we caught up with them out in the LFA parking lot out back. I was able to isolate one briefly with a flashlight. No longer a baby, but not as big as a mama owl, to be sure. More light grey in color.

Mary had texted Rob and he came out to the parking lot to join us. Rob heads off to Seattle at the end of the week, fulfilling a long-held dream of spending more time there after a much ballyhooed summer he spend there back in college. We'll see if it takes. He has found things he likes here in NC, but hasn't fully found his groove. Certainly he's not a fan of the heat, but then who really is? But maybe the magic of our neighborhood wildlife will grow on him. 

Baby owls and my back yard

Some years ago -- and I can't believe I didn't capture it here -- either Mary or I heard this odd whistling whooshing sound coming from our backyard. We looked out to see what it was and discovered -- baby owls, three or four of them, up in a tree branch outside our bedroom window. We went upstairs to get closer to us and looked up at them. They looked down at us. When we moved their heads moved in unison to track us. It was magical.

The other night when I took the visiting Mike White out to Sidetrack where we enjoyed a nice visit with Rod, who was hosting from behind the bar, Mary and Graham once more heard the sound of baby owls and then found them with a flashlight, up in a tree. I am sad to have missed it. Mary took a picture but they are far enough away and it was dark enough that it's hard to see them. And it would be just a picture anyway.

This morning sitting out here on the porch, where I take my breakfast in the warm months as weather permits, I saw an owl fly from tree to tree. Not a rare sighting to be honest. Of course there had to be a dear too, likely having inspected our compost pile to see what kind of edible treat we had thrown out their for his delectation. I can hear lots of birds.

I understand NIMBYs. Our backyard is a magical place, and one becomes accustomed to the specific magic of specific places. But the correlation between population density and productivity is more magical yet, if less self-evident and more complicated to create. If you want more owls and birds you can always move further out, towards the Frontier, as Americans always have. You can move to Vermont, for example, which is hemorrhaging people. Or West Virginia.

Carbon futility

As the world rushes heedlessly, breathlessly into the AI breach in search of AI dominance (for a sobering take watch this interview with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt), it becomes ever harder to justify to onesself any attempt to limit one's carbon consumption. The world de facto seems to have swallowed the argument that climate change is fake news and not worth thinking about. I mean, hell, Elon's gonna take us to Mars where it will be all better, right?

In fact, now more than ever I think we need to cultivate carbon mindfulness. None of us is perfect. I still eat a burger a week and other meat too, though mostly chicken. I haven't been able to adjust to setting my AC lower than 74 on a consistent basis (though I did just now put a note to get a ceiling fan installed in my study, which will help). 

But it is not all over and it is not all bullshit. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. The life of people on the coasts is under threat (to the eventual benefit of those who own land inland, portending well for our acreage in Roxboro, though this is scarcely cause to celebrate). The game is not over, and it is not a game. 

Someone much smarter than me told me over coffee a year or so back that the next financial crisis is on its way as it becomes ever more expensive to insure homes throughout the country due to extreme weather events. When that happens, banks can't issue mortgages. I've probably blogged about it before but don't have time to check right now. Ignoring facts because they "don't align with the priorities of this administration" does not change those facts. And I don't think anyone is going to create an AI that will outsmart Mother Nature.

Deep Progress

Of late I've been making my way through Impossible Monsters, Michael Taylor's book about how the discovery of dinosaurs in the 19th century -- and especially the finding of lots of them in Great Britain then -- informed the eventual overthrow of a profoundly and suprisingly repressive Christianity that was prevalent there then. It's a bit of a grind, at times just about as scintillating as it sounds, though it has its moments.

In the mornings I've been reading Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which came up in conversation with Graham because there was a question about it in a recent Quiz Bowl tournament somewhere. The book was a big hit in its day, I'll come back to discuss that later.

One thing that's common between them and a little surprising to those of us who pass our days within the comforting bosom of the 21st century is how easily people died one and two centuries ago, even those like Taylor's subjects who were the denizens of the economic and scientific elite of a world power in the fullness of its flourishing. Kids just got sick and they were dead a day or two later. Darwin lost two of his ten kids in infancy, another (a favorite) died at the age of 10. He and his wife suspected that maybe their kids were genetically weak because they were cousins but had nonetheless wed. The people of Spoon River -- who narrate from beyond the grave -- also die from a wide range of things easily preventable or curable now, including lots from accidents that just don't happen now because of workplace safety or product design regulations.

In short, people have benefited an awful lot in the last couple of centuries from the deepening and dissemination of medical best practices but also due to the rise of public health and the regulations to which the discipline has given rise. More or less from the rise of policy informed by statistics. How easily this is forgotten. People have lived longer and better lives.

It ain't all perfect. The rise of "deaths of despair" and their negative impact on aggregate mortality -- especially in the US -- has been a challenge over the last decade and change. We should keep working on it. 

Aid and Diplomacy as Costs of Sales & Marketing

The Trumpian right has long disdained spending on foreign aid as a waste of money, despite the fact that we spend very little on it, a little more than 1% of GDP. But as the self-declared pro-business party, Republicans should understand sales and marketing expenses. Businesses at different phases in their growth arcs have different expectations for sales and marketing expenses. Start ups spend more, mature businesses spend less, maybe 2-10% as a rule of thumb. Democracy US-style is obviously by now a pretty mature business (though it may behoove us to take a cue from Amazon's annual letter and try to adopt a perennial "Day 1" mindset). 

If we take the very cynical view that US diplomacy and aid are all about selling and marketing democracy and societies based on rules and principles as opposed to doing good, all of a sudden the equation changes. What we get for our expenses is a halo and greater international interoperability, people who want to come here to live thus lowering our talent acquisition costs -- especially for higher value add functions like innovation. We also get countries who want to buy our debt because they see us as stable and legitimate.

Oh yeah, and we save lives and do the right thing. 

But Trump and Vance have instead decided to hand victory to China by saying that international relations are all about deals and raw power, no values. The whole world loses.

The centrifugal force of the New World Order

As the US and to a lesser extent the world veers ever more in the direction of multipolarity via one-off tariffs instead of global and regional trade and other agreements, certain calculi are shifting. Trade and international affairs are going to become ever more complex, necessitating a better educated diplomatic corps not just for governments but for smaller entities (states, municipalities, countries). Although AI's ability to do simultaneous translation will get better and better when dealing face to face with one another people will always prefer someone who has made the effort to learn their language.

Moreover, product development and targeting should get more complex. This will favor those who have made the effort to get to know languages and cultures. Somehow I doubt AI is going to take this over. Maybe it's the romantic in me, me pulling for John Henry vs the steam drill.

Until the US gets its shit straight this will end up favoring non-US companies, the Unilevers of the world, who take the time to get to know their markets. Admittedly platforms are eating up product-makers for the most part, but a new world order may end up favoring a new type of platform also. We've seen huge platforms grow abroad: Alibaba, Tencent, Didi, Mercadolibre, NuBank. So long as they don't get stepped on by their sovereigns, as Xi did to Alibaba and Didi, they should flourish. 

Teamwork, teamwork that's what counts

Somehow I missed the Champions League final last Saturday, despite having it on my calendar. Since it is several days ago I hope I don't spoil anything by saying that PSG whumped Inter 5-0.

This year's season was nothing short of remarkable for PSG, primarily because the club became the most successful example of addition by subtraction since our '83 CHHS team benefited from the departure of the talented but selfish and disruptive T.R. After trying to build a franchise around the wonder trio of Messi, Neymar and Mbappe, PSG reached the top after all of them left and Ousmene Dembele blossomed after years of playing in the shadow of bigger names. Yes, some younger folks also grew into larger roles, but it was only because the space was made for them to do so.

Hats off.

The Shame of the Left

For a long time -- maybe since Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford -- it seemed like the extreme American Right held a monopoly on lethal political violence. More recently things have changed. In my mind -- this could be a function of my own blindness -- it really got ramped up when a left wing guy with a rifle tried to take out a bunch of Republican members of Congress at an annual baseball game in January 2017, injuring Steve Scalise of Louisiana. We were all fortunate no one else was hurt and that Scalise was not hurt worse than he was.

Today there's a headline about an attack with a freaking flamethrower on some people in Boulder exercising their First Amendment rights. This follows hard on the assassination of a couple of young Israeli Embassy staffers in DC. And the killing in broad daylight of the United Healthcare CEO last December. And the attempt to assassinate Trump on the Florida golf course (the kid in Pennsylvania does not seem to have been on the left). There's been more.

All of these should be condemned unequivocally and forcefully. That is not who we are. If liberals are going to decry violence on the Right we need to be consistent. More fundamentally, people aren't supposed to kill each other. Full stop.

postscrypt:  I just went back and saw that the attacker is an Egyptian. That doesn't really change anything that I said. Everybody on all sides needs to dial it back.

The Big, Beautiful Pile of Shit

The Republicans think it's all one big fucking joke. "DOGE," "One Big Beautiful Bill." It would be utterly infuriating had we not become accomplished to such unprecedented loads of continual nonsense and duplicity.

Yeah, the Democrats are far from perfect. Jill Biden and the rest of those surrounding Biden seem to have screwed us all pretty good. If Biden had degenerated so far why didn't he just step down and let Kamala be President? It would have been fine. The USA would have had its first female President.

Frankly, Biden being out of the public eye was fine with me. I am sick of thinking about the President all the time. He is the leader of the country, sure, but at the end of the day he is just another public employee and we don't really want any given living human dominating our lives. I think real Christians would much rather be thinking about Christ, Buddhists about Buddha, Muslims about Mohammed, etc. We would all be happier if the President was smaller. So Biden having a limited footprint on our lives would have been fine, had it been because he was just focusing on doing his job. 

New World Order with fries and a shake

After reading Anne Applebaum's Autocracy Inc which lays out ways in which the word's autocracies (China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Hungary, El Salvador and increasingly the USA, amongst others) provide services to and support one another on the world stage, I began to muse on Ian Bremmer's thesis that the world has new major strategic actors, namely the megatech companies we all know and love to hate but cannot do without. Then I read a review in the Economist of a couple of books about Yevgenii Prigozhin, Wagner Group and its successor entities (most notably the Afrika Corps, currently enjoying semi-autonomy in central Africa).

The big state powers sense the threat, hence Xi Jinping's decision to disappear Jack Ma of Alibaba a few years back and also to take other steps to make sure others don't experience similar rises. Pony Ma of Tencent has kept a low profile to avoid a similar fate.

Elon Musk, even aside from his DOGE doings, has already become a semi-autonomous political actor, alternately providing and withholding Starlink service to the Ukrainian armed forces depending on how he felt it would impact his relationship with Putin (but really, presumably, with Russia's sworn butt-buddy China, which is large enough to meaningfully impact Musk's business strategy).

What if, I mused, the megatech companies were to dispense with the mediation of nation-states and just pursue relationships with private security firms like Afrika Corps or, to dredge one up from the not-too-distant past, Blackwater?

I discussed this over dinner with Graham and Mary last week and Graham argued convincingly for an impressive number of reasons that it wasn't feasible. I had thought that at least it would bubble up in consciousness in art: books and movies, just as the Blackwater-Halliburton relationship was contemplated back in the days of the Iraq War.

On this, at least, I was not wrong. Cue this weekend's release of Mountainhead on Max.

Embracing the Grind, but really?

Was up at 8am this morning to go have breakfast with the Mayor. I talked to her about a client matter, then we talked about other stuff, including the fact that I am only on one Board now since I left the LFA Board a couple of years ago and am marginally underemployed in doing stuff around public goods.

So she suggested that I run for Town Council. I guess I should have seen this coming since she and David Schwartz had tried to talk me into doing it years ago, but I wasn't really thinking. On the one hand, it seems like it would be a lot of work. On the other hand, it would be good work, as she pointed out.

Sigh. It's a good point. 

Mary is not in favor of this.

An AI for wisdom

Just read an Economist leader on the fact that the Chinese government is egging its champions to focus on practical applications for AI, as opposed to the maniacal mad dash towards AGI (artificial general intelligence) prioritized by the West's tech titans. The first thing that echoes in my brain is Robert Plant saying "Does anyone remember laughter?"

This is quickly shunted from my frontal lobe by the question of wisdom. There have been a lot of smart people in history, boatloads of geniuses. Many are remembered within their domains of interest, some are elevated above that level to more universal recognition, but to a certain extent that's a function of the reach and dominance of their cultures. Think Shakespeare. A genius for sure (if he even existed and/or created all the works included in the accepted canon of his work), but surely the unversality of his reach was facilitated by the British and American empires and the reach of English as a language. And sure, there were lots of scientific geniuses whose inventions have made all of our lives better.

But there are fewer ethical geniuses. There are those who founded the great religions plus a few more: Gandhi, King, Mandela, maybe St Francis. It is odd to think that all the names that spring to mind come from the 20th century, perhaps it's a function of our short memory or of the fact that modern media (print, film and their associated distribution networks) allow for generalized ethical leaders in a way that wasn't feasible before. Or perhaps that democracy itself encourages their appearance and/or discourages regimes from snuffing them out.

In any case, more than any kind of AI, we need ethical leaders. More than knowledge now, we need wisdom. 

An hour or so later, it occurs to me that perhaps what we need is not so much ethical geniuses, since, thinking back to Kierkegaarde's statement in his prolegomonon or whatever to Fear and Trembling, there is no progress in ethics. We all begin back at the same place. What we need instead is for people to go consistently to their respective churches, temples, 12-step meetings, community gardens and organizations, etc., and reflect deeply and properly on what they are doing each day. And then do the right thing.

It would be nice to see the total amount of charitable giving in the US rise above the 2% mark to which it has long been pinned, tax rates notwithstanding.

Debt service vs. Trade deficit

Trump has continual paroxysms over the US trade deficit. By buying things from the rest of the world, he tells us, the US is being "ripped off" blah blah blah continual nonsensical bloviation "I have really big hands." In fact under Trump the trade deficit stayed more or less constant with how it had been under Obama, even growing a little bit. It had been much worse leading up to the financial crisis, though to call it worse is to imply that it's bad at all and I'm not ready to concede that. The deficit got bigger under Biden. I'm fine with that. We purchased goods from lower cost providers.

You would think he would be equally if not more concerned about needing to pay interest on the debt to foreigners. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost to service the debt will approach $1 trillion in 2025 and will rise from there.

Foreign holders of US debt, firstly Japan, China and the UK but lots of others too, hold about 30% of our debt. So we're likely paying them $300 billion a year for having lent us money. That's about $900 a year for each and every one of us. In general I think we are better off buying things from lower cost providers and being a reliable enough counterparty for them that they are happy to buy our debt at lower rather than higher prices.

Which would imply that we should take deficits seriously and try to both exercise budgetary restraint -- for instance by taking steps to put Social Security and Medicare on firmer footing, which would be financially meaningful, instead of just fucking around, firing federal employees willy-nilly and canceling grants for which funds have already been allocated -- and raise more revenue by increasing taxes on those who can pay instead of pursuing long-since debunked supply side economic voodoo.

When the bond market is unhappy with what the government is doing, the cost to service the debt goes up. This is a bad dynamic. Republicans should think about this before doing stupid shit and Democrats should too.

Shrinking universities, shrinking GDP

The Journal ran a story today about how non-flagship state universities are shrinking all around America and taking the economies of the communities around them. How stupid is that.

America's universities have been engines of growth for a long time. As I noted a few weeks back in this post, the birthrate decline being harped upon by Mr. Turbosperm Elon Musk and other rabid pro-natalists with no credible policy ideas has been going on for a long time. For the most part, the population side of America's economic growth has been tied to immigration, and our universities have been a great way to encourage the middle-class of the developing world to come to America and pay money while learning English and American ways in general. I can't pull statistics out of my butt but I am willing to bet that the best broad cohort of immigrants has come through universities.

And it can't all be Ivy League and Public Ivies. There's not enough of it to go around. But the great thing is that we've been educating a professoriate for decades and there are solid and dedicated faculty members spread throughout America's universities. No less a luminary than Kyla Scanlon, the shiniest economist of her generation and a person of considerable wisdom for her tender age, went to Western Kentucky University. Not the fanciest university in America but obviously they have som very fine good people there.

So instead of randomly grabbing immigrant students out of dorms and off the streets and throwing them in holding facilities to show how big and bad we are we should be actively recruiting cash-paying foreign students to come to our universities, live in the dorms, eat in the restaurants and become the productive, educated Americans we so desire.

We don't understand what a competitive advantage this is and won't till it's gone.

Small triumph

Started off today's league match with a guy roughly 20 years my junior in a bit of a funk, rusty from not having played much in the last couple of weeks, feeling pretty low energy. I served horribly, lots of double faults. He was breaking my serve, and rightly so. He served well. 

But I kept breaking him back. I took him to a tiebreaker, where I defeated him 7-5. Really he should have won, but he didn't. I did. I kept my head in the game and refocused on winning the next point, when I did just often enought to squeak through. After 90 minutes, he had to go home because he has a newborn daughter and is on a short leash. I think it was a little demoralizing for him. Which was exactly my point, in the end. We'll have to finish up another day. Honestly he was lucky he had an excuse to leave because I was ready to run him into the ground.

Back home, I showered outside and enjoyed the cool breeze blowing around me and marveled at the flowers growing on the fence on the border of our yard and the neighbors -- put there many years ago so that the older woman next door wouldn't have to watch my dad toodle around naked all the time. I had been neglecting the outdoor shower thus far this season. No longer. 

Frames of reference

All too often these days you see statements like "the highest/lowest since" followed by a recent time: "lowest housing starts since the last quarter of 2022" or "lowest imports since the first quarter of 2023." This is nothing masquerading as something. All that is being said is that a given phenomenon is occurring within a normal range. Try "lowest since before the financial crisis" or "highest since the first Bush administration." Then you've got my attention. Otherwise find some news on which to report.

Revisiting "The Power Broker"

I recently listened to my friend Geoff Kabaservice's podcast with Marc Dunkelman, author of the recent book Why Nothing Works. The book echoes much of the "abundance" line of thinking flowing out of Ezra Klein's well-oiled machine, arguing from a "liberal" perspective that America has bound itself up to tightly in red tape, which makes it impossible to get anything done. Trump et al would not disagree.

One legacy that is being rethought is that of Robert Moses and indeed of Robert Caro's bio of him The Power Broker and the extent to which it has reshaped thought about Moses himself and his work. Dunkelman points out that Caro works hard to take Moses down, but that it was Moses who got things built, and that after Moses and Caro it got ever harder to get things built. I am oversimplifying here due to the cadence of this blog and my days, you must understand.

A few thoughts. First, I don't think Caro's goal in his book is entirely to tear Moses down. Reading Caro, one cannot but be in a certain awe of Moses' intense productivity, the amount of stuff he got done, the number of jobs he held, even as one appreciates the ironies of such facts as that Moses never had a driver's license but would sit in the back of his limo reading and dictating furiously to his admin who traveled with him. Also, although the Dunkelman (and Klein and others going back at least a decade) point out that the NIMBYism which has grown out of the Jane Jacobs/Lewis Mumford line of thought that constrained Moses has gotten out of control, I think nobody really would have wanted Moses to get his way and build cross-town expressways at 14th, 42nd, and 72nd, or wherever he was proposing. Moses needed constraining. Nor would many fault Caro's critique of Moses's failure to provide for right of way for a train when building the the Van Wyck Expressway (from Manhattan to Idewild/JFK), or the fact that when he built expressways on Long Island headed out towards the beach and suburbs he intentionally built overpasses too low to permit buses so as to admit only cars and keep out the riffraff.

In short, Caro's point is that Moses was a complex figure who did incredible things. Some of the sacrifices required of communities were sad but necessary. But on some specific points he was pretty evil. And we are glad people rose up to slow him down some, even if by now we can see that some of the constraining forces his opponents gave rise to have ossified into counterproductive forces we should reconsider.

A Bend in the River

Don't know where I picked up a copy of this 1979 VS Naipaul novel about a South Asian merchant from the coast of an unnamed East African nation who migrates a sleepy town in the nation's interior after some political dislocation on the coast. While he's there a new regime rises and drifts towards more and more authoritarianism. 

Ever for someone with a background in Russian literature, Naipaul novels tend to move rather slowly (based on a sample of two novels, admittedly). For a while the whole thing was rather bogged down. Then a compatriot of his from the Indian community on the coast shows up in town, riding shotgun with a new development including a Polytechnic institute and some expatriots up the river a few miles. Eventually our hero gets integrated into that community and, fortunately for the reader, having frequent sex with this Belgian woman. Though the sex isn't described in a lot of salacious detail, it's nice to feel our narrator's pulse quicken, and the plot with it.

Ultimately he travels to London and then back again, only to find the cordon of the state tightening around him. It's pretty dicey thereafter.

Overall a good solid novel. Naipaul has his own groove and takes us places we mightn't otherwise go. It's important as well that as an author he precedes the highly moralizing tone of most later "post-colonial" literature, and indeed that the South Asian commercial communities in Africa occupy something of an interstitial space between the all-too often Manichean struggle of "natives" and "colonizers" that undergirds so much later fiction of the developing world, much like the Chinese merchants we see in the novels of Naipaul's Indonesian contemporary Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose Buru Quartet I should go back and read again. 

The One and the Many, take 117

Reading Peggy Noonan today about the ascension of Pope Leo XIV, she quotes Benedict XVI about the fact that a Pope is around for but a speck of time in the context of the church. Which evokes Carl Sagan and his proverbial "billions and billions" of stars or John McPhee's n books about geologists and the time scales over which they must think.

But first it made me think about "The Crown," of which I still have maybe three or four episodes in season 6 to watch. At its best the show has always been about the tension between the sovereign's desires as a human and her/his duty to the institution of the monarchy and also the polity it serves. Which seems at one level like a fairly rare and bespoke thing, hence the occasional allusions to the sovereign's Christ-life suffering.

But it's not really that rare at all. We're all living it in our own ongoing tension between public and private interests. Do we buy the new car or give money to charity? Take the higher-paying job or work in the public sector? Or (per Effective Altruism) max out earning so as to give more away? Watch the game or go volunteer at the homeless shelter? Encourage our kids to make money or do good? It's endless. All day every day. And then we go to bed. 

Old shirts

A rip appeared in the elbow of one of my very favorite work shirts this week. It's a spring colored shirt, somewhat light blue with fairly but not too bright green stripes. As with so many of my best shirts, I found it some time ago in a thrift store, meaning that someone else, a greatly valued if unseen partner, had performed much of the invaluable work of wearing it to optimal softness.

I was saddened by this occurence and thought that maybe I should shorten the sleaves and make a summer shirt of it. Then last weekend I was talking to Crabill about it and he said that either he or Whitsel had  tried that with a favorite shirt and it just hadn't worked. I am already $40 in to the failed experiment of putting patches on my grey chamois shirt that is now so uncomfortable that I never wear it. It hangs in the purgatory of my closed waiting for me to admit that its failure and consign it to the waste bin. Or take it back to the thrift store, where it might be useful to someone else.

Last weekend's conversation at least confirmed that I am not crazy in these thoughts and schemes. Or maybe I am, but I am far from alone in my craziness, that it is veritably in the water here. Which comforts me. 

Swirling forces

These days it seems that all the time things are happening so quickly that we cannot process them all. I don't have time to list them all out, but you know what I mean.

Great ironies proliferate. For example, when Trump says something like "maybe kids will have to get by on two dolls rather than thirty" we feel that out of tribal loyalties we must scoff, but if Greta Thunberg or another environmentalist had proposed a high tax on ultra-cheap plastic junk coming out of China's factories to price in the Pigovian externalities of plastic and stem the growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch we would all heartily endorse it.

Similarly, the left scoffed at and the right embraced Robert Bork's logic which formed the basis of a generation or two's thinking about antitrust law, that consumer benefit should be the primary goal and guiding principle behind antitrust law. When Lina Khan advanced a different model based on the negative impacts of platform power, the left jumped for joy, Biden made her head of the FTC at the tender age of 32 and with de minimis management experience, even portions of the Right buy some of her logic. Meanwhile Bork's view of consumer benefit as guiding principle, which would inveigh strongly against tariffs and in particular the way trade barriers keep things like BYD cars out of the hands of American consumers, is invoked ever more rarely these days. So nowadays it is the Left's turn to gently advocate for consumer benefit. Ultimately I think it's a complex question.

One aside re Bork. He was never an appealing figure, always seemed kind of like a crusty old bastard. But he was an acclaimed jurist. Ultimately, the attack on Bork, led by Chapel Hill's own favorite son Walter Dellinger, marked the ramping up of the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination process. Maybe it was always going to go that way, I don't know. It's a moment in time I think we have to look back on and ponder.

ps. I wrote this before learning of David Souter's passing. He was a fine man, the Jimmy Carter of the high bench. We could use a few more of those.

Will future value chains miss links?

There's an infathomably large body of work out there about all the things AI is going to do for us in the future. On one thing there is fairly broad consensus: AI will help us automate the simple tasks so we can focus on higher value ones.

On the one hand, sure, I can see how this will go. But the fact is that there's a function to the simpler tasks in terms of letting us reflect on what we are doing to internalize lessons, abstract up and make the higher order realizations that allow us to make improvements higher up the value chain. I think most specifically about the passage in Tolstoi's journal where he describes the reflective state he gets into when sweeping the floor. Victor Shklovskii grounded his concept of "defamiliarization" in this passage from Tolstoi about sweeping.

One can easily argue that it has ever been thus. Technology and mechanization have taken lower-value add tasks off of our plates and we've subsequently been able to step into a given value chain somewhere much higher along it and begin our work there. Again, I think back to Samuel Pepys walking or waiting around London in 1660 to distribute cash to people, in particular soldiers. It's important for soldiers to get paid, of course, lest they get pissed and go out looting. We can just direct deposit to their bank accounts now.

But might their come a time when so much has been automated that too much of the original skill is lost. As I have written before, my utter dependance on Google Maps to get around disturbs me. I used to get to know the places I lived and would be able to easily navigate. I can still do it in Chapel Hill, but is that only because I lived there earlier in life? Could a lack of analogous knowledge-base formation in the future entirely dislocate important value chains in ways we can't anticipate?

Off to the lake

Apologies for the relative silence. Headed off to a friend's lake house for guys' weekend featuring pig, chicken, biking, swimming and, if we are very stupid late middle-aged guys, basketball. I have decided to leave my laptop at home because really who needs a larger computer when we all have the small ones in our pockets. And ears and mouths.