Western swing

Drove west late in the week, first to Greenville, SC, then to Asheville for a conference. I was mostly on interstates, so I didn't really see anything interesting -- though looking at the construction on 85 near Kannapolis and how it looked like they were putting in drains in the area between the east- and westbound lanes got me to thinking -- on the drive back, on how that might be a limiting factor on whether or not to plant trees there in the median.

I mean, really, why don't they?  In some places they do, in others they don't. It seems like trees in the middle of interstates would be an unalloyed good: shade, carbon sink, noise dampening, etc. Then again, maybe they would be just another thing for people to run into and kill themselves, plus they would shed leaves (or pine needles) that would need to be cleaned up, and they could blow over in hurricanes, etc. The world is deucedly complex.

I spent a good deal of time listening to Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, which I think is pretty well argued. He takes on not just Trump etc. (you knew that was coming), but the romantic declinism and anti-progress bias of cultural elites. I.e. those who claim that we don't actually progress in fundamental ways. And he is right, this is a major strand of thought amongst the literary elite. I think at worst it devolves into a lazy excuse on the part of the chattering class not to study science, a fault to which your fair blogger, sadly, must confess guilt.

What it is not is a scintillating page-turner. He cites a lot of data, referencing charts one can't see as one drives down the road. There are some serious critics of Pinker out there, he is accused of cherry-picking. I'll try to dig more deeply into them when I finish the book. For now, I think he has some points.

Was also listening to Cat Power, who has a great voice.

What Zuckerberg hath wrought

So many of the people I like best and admire most are not on Facebook. Or, perhaps, they just stand out as distinctive for taking a stand and/or just being distinctive, like wearing a cool shoes or a groovy jacket, because many of the people I like best and admire most are on Facebook too.

There's no question that it's a big potential timesuck. But it's also true that, in its absence, there's no way I'd be in touch with or tuned in to the concerns of so many people who are differ from me in meaningful ways. Yes, I do need to seek them out intentionally and intently, because the algorithms hide them from me, and there are vast forests and oceans of people who are even more different from me whose pages I have occasionally made my way over to, only to get a little bit freaked out.

So yeah, it's unquestionably a mixed bag, and it plays on our insecurities insofar as it tempts us to become like-whores (if you can't quickly grok that phrase, good for you!).

The everlasting grind

I could certainly get more sleep. I tell myself that every day, every night, but somehow I never quite do it.

There is always so much to do, and for some reason I feel like I need to do most of it. It is great to get help from unexpected places. For example, getting ready to meet with a client tomorrow, that rare client who has a defined benefit pension plan. To plug the projected benefit into our planning software, I need to figure out what the projected benefit is, which can be a lot of work. Fortunately, the client's wife kicks ass and has gone in and figured that out for me, and in an email exchange it's become clear that I probably can't do that specific chunk of work better than she can.

Which is excellent, because it lets me go do something else that will help them and/or someone else.

Like the crap I need to do for my HOA board before tonight's meeting. Blech. I guess I should go do that. It's gonna be a long day, but a good one.

Zadie Smith

I just finished Zadie Smith's Swing Time, the first book of hers I've read. I don't know whether I was resisting it or what, maybe it's just because I was reading it almost only before going to bed, but for much of it I had a hard time fully catching the groove. Maybe it was because the protagonist was herself floundering, looking for direction. Maybe it was because the regular alternation of past and present felt a little stilted at times. In any case, there were definitely times I felt like it could have been shortened 100-150 pages.

But now that it's over, I'm a little sad. I suppose it's because our heroine was just beginning to see some openings, to find some direction, to emerge from the shadows of others, in her own way of speaking. But then she was gone, like Keyser Soze.

I will read more.

Seeming agony

When I was growing up and running a lot, and somewhat fleetly, I remember seeing older guys running along the side of the road, slowly, painfully, wearing the grimmest of grimaces. I would look at them and think, those poor souls, why do they even bother to come out and run?

Now that is me. Grey and plodding, but determined. And the fact is, as often as not I am slow and in pain because I did something more athletic and punishing to my body the day before, soccer, tennis, something a little less age appropriate. So it hurts to run because I am sore and inflamed. Yes, it is true that I am also not all that lithe and carefree, there's no denying that I'm not a competitive marathoner, but much of the apparent agony derives from something I am recovering from, which is also something I would rather not live without.

I wonder how much of this I have in common with those other guys from back in the day. Probably some.

Fatties

Natalie called me up yesterday to ask for my advice. She needed to read a novel for English, something she could write about from a Marxist perspective, and she wondered if I would recommend Anna Karenina. I of course had to remind her that it was a pretty thick book, which I think she knew, then she listed off a bunch of other options. Almost all of them were shorter; none of them were compelling. So she decided to roll forward with Anna K.

Let's keep in mind that she's graduating in 7 weeks or so, and she has AP exams between now and then. She has also been enjoying herself some, going on little hikes and picnics with friends, relaxing a little. Watching Brooklyn 99 before bed with me. But Tolstoi it is.

I was reminded of how, sometime after the academic pressure was over my senior year, I don't remember if it was before or after graduation, I decided it was time to read Crime and Punishment. I was reading it at the beach, sitting in a squat chair in the shallow waves near our beach place at Emerald Isle, working on my tan, while the rather country girls in bikinis and whatnot walked up and down the beach. I never did make much progress getting to know them, primarily because I was kind of afraid to speak to them because what the hell was I gonna say? We had little in common.

At some point in time I left my Dostoievskii sitting on the arm of my chair and it fell into the water. I decided that this meant I wasn't supposed to read it then, and probably picked up a spy novel.

Things got better in New Haven.

Which side of the big picture

In the Journal this morning there were couple of big-trend articles which caught my eye

1. Teenagers are getting drawn into the workforce because of labor shortages
2. There is a massive shortfall of housing units since the financial crisis

Item 1 is generally great for labor market participants. Unemployment was going in the right direction for a long time under Obama, and has kept doing so since Trump unleashed animal spirits in the business world. We just can't argue that. We like to think that, net net, people will benefit.

The housing shortfall is clearly related to item 1: construction workers are in short supply.

Both the labor and housing shortage are exacerbated by the failure to reach an agreement on DACA.  We could use the 800,000 dreamers for sure. In my mind, the big question becomes, is it worth vilifying Trump at every turn if we drive the dreamers out, if we guarantee their departure from American soil? I don't know. That is a question above my pay grade, but we have to think about it.

In some sense, the Dreamers make the struggle with Trump into something like a classical tragedy. As he goes down, presuming that he does, he will thrash around and there will be collateral damage. Will it be worth it?

I suspect that, if we can revivify and recenter the Democratic Party, it will be worth it. But there are costs.

In the public eye

An article in the NY Times this morning about women lured into questionable surgeries so they can be potential high-return participants in class action suits got me to thinking about public vs. private markets and where we stand right now. The article details how alliances of law firms and hedge funds and other private funding vehicles track down and then convince women to have vaginal mesh implants removed, because women who have had them removed can recover large settlements in suits, whereas if they haven't had the procedure, they don't get much $.

Meanwhile, the number of publicly-listed companies in the US has declined by about half from 1996, from 7300ish to 3700ish.  Estimates of global assets in hedge funds and private equity funds stands at about $8 trillion (note that a large chunk of the former is in publicly traded securities). The best estimate is that there are now 233 "unicorns", privately held firms with valuations in excess of $1 bln. The best known of them in the West include household names like Uber and AirBnb.  It is impossible to guess how big the universe of small, privately-held speculative investment opportunities there are out there, but participating in private deals is de rigeur amongst people with money these days, it is a mark of status.

Now, what do these two things have to do with one another, you may ask? The fact that it is cool to invest outside of public markets, combined with the decline of public markets, encourages shitty things to happen in the shadows, like cold-calling working class women and telling them they might die next week if they don't come get some questionable surgery, so they can get cash in a settlement which you then take from them. Securities regulators and the transparency mandated by their reporting requirements acts as a general force for good in the world. They don't stop this stuff, but they funnel cash towards less evil behavior, in aggregate.

But it's complicated. Companies don't list on exchanges because the cost of compliance with regulations is high. We can't force them to list if they can get money elsewhere. One of the biggest and most onerous of the filing requirements is Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which came in after the scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco and others back in the 2001-2002 timeframe.  A friend of mine from a large consultancy referred to SOX as the "universal consultant's employment act" at the time, because figuring out how to comply and then complying was such a huge undertaking.

I don't necessarily favor getting rid of SOX, I'm just citing that as an example, but balancing the costs of regulatory compliance with other downstream knock-on effects is not simple.

Keeping score

I am fast approaching my 52nd birthday, a milestone made particularly meaningful by the fact that it means I will be exactly twice as old as the guy who anchors the defense for me on our soccer team. A guy who, I should mention, in practice on Tuesday was trying to nutmeg me and instead hit me in the nuts as hard as I have ever been hit. It was excruciatingly painful. He may one day hear the end of it, but it is difficult to predict when that will be.

Actually, as I said in my last post, right now everything is framed by the fact that Natalie's high school graduation is fast approaching, and she is headed off to college soon. With all the planning I have to do in various domains, I get planning fatigue, and I have been dragging my feet on vacation planning. We don't know what we're doing this summer. In recent evenings, I have been digging into this topic. On the one hand, I am a little exhausted by two summers of point-to-point vacations, where we start in one place, end another, and have lots of logistics to deal with in the middle.  So I want to just more or less be in one place. On the other hand, I'd like for Natalie's potentially last summer vacation to be special and memorable.

Part of me does scorekeeping at the level of: "I went to Europe twice before college (she's been once), and visited more tropical places than she has (zero)." I feel like I should give her something roughly at parity with that. In my mind I even handicapped it and guilt-tripped myself: "The world is more globalized now than it was, people go to Asia and shit now."

But here's the main thing. She sings to herself in her room. When I was bored, I was driving around drunk, getting high, measuring my own self-worth by how many women I had slept with (and how hot they were), etc. The other night for fun she went to a candidates' forum and came back discussing the relative merits of the wise incumbent (David Price) vs. the breath of fresh air challenger (Michelle Cotton-Laws).

So I think I am doing OK.

Decisions, decisions

It is only 10:25 and already my mind is at risk of getting hijacked by the swarm, the concerns and anxieties of others. Which is to say that I responded to a couple of texts and looked at Facebook before turning to the blog, always a somewhat risky proposition. I've also had a fair amount of coffee, including some before eating, which is something that I do every day even though I know I probably shouldn't, according to a lot of research.

In any case, the topic at hand is: college. Specifically Natalie going to college. She had a great application season, candidly I will say she got into Yale (which I've already said), UNC, Smith, Barnard, and Cornell, but got dinged by Columbia and waitlisted by Duke. She had already come to the realization that she didn't want to go to a place where everybody camped out to get tickets to a basketball game, so Duke was more or less off the list anyway in the absence of a fat merit-based offer.

She reasons that, having grown up in Princeton and then Chapel Hill, she has always lived in college towns, so she is biased against Smith and Cornell on that basis (this was exactly my process in weeding out Amherst back in the day, so I can't fault her there) So the decision is now basically down to Yale vs. Barnard. Yale's financial aid offer was better, largely because its financial aid formula treats home equity in one's primary residence more favorably, so that's a mark in Yale's favor.

Plus Yale is just, well, Yale.

So we are restraining ourselves and trying to let her make her decision, but I will confess that it's hard not to just take her by the shoulders and make the decision for her.

But Barnard has things going for it too, and last night at Caroline's 50th birthday party James and Hayes were plumping pretty hard for Barnard, saying how the Barnard kids they hired were totally kick-ass, while some of the Yale kids were kinda duds.

I am reminded as well of the experience of a couple we know, whose girl (a friend of Natalie's) got into Columbia and got a full ride to Emory but almost had a nervous breakdown and ended up going to Duke. They stayed above the fray and let him make his decision.

In the end, it's all good. I remember a couple of summers ago, Natalie and I took a one-night road trip from Larchmont up to Cornell and Colgate, plus hanging with Corinna (a Barnard grad) and John Adams on the way. We listened to Frank Bruno's Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be, a very wise if occasionally dry book about our college-selection insanity culture. In essence, he is right.

In honesty, I am being driven crazy by the fact that she is leaving, not the brand with which she will be associated going forward.

Moment of clarity

Yesterday afternoon I was at a light on 15-501, coming around south of Chapel Hill, having made very good time on 40 on my way to Rainbow soccer practice. My Subaru was all covered in pollen, flowers were blooming. I was listening to Sufjan Stephens, only kinda singing along, cuz I didn't really know the words. A college girl in a dark green Nissan looked over at me at the light as if I were not unattractive. I was feeling a little badassed.

At practice, I scored some goals.

Rain in Seattle

I have heard that it rains a lot in Seattle but, oddly enough, I had never seen it until today. It is grey, cold and, yes, a little wet now. But Mark and I are about to head out and put in a few miles because, Lord knows we have been eating a fuckload of food. And it is a good place to do that.

Last night, before bed, I discovered videos of this kid Mac McClung, and the genre of basketball reaction videos. Just watch.

Defeat

In Seattle now, hanging with my friend Mark, who recently had his Bar Mitzvah, at the tender age of 52. For our inaugural distance book club, Mark suggested that we read Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's mid-sixties classic The Lonely Man of Faith. Soloveitchik takes as his jumping off point a well known split within the Old Testament, which happens at the very beginning. Genesis I narrates the creation of a man (Adam the First) charged with achieving majesty and dignity, of commanding over nature. Genesis II, by way of contrast, has another creation myth, in which man (Adam the Second) is created from dust and is charged with caring for nature.

On this chilly Shabbos morning, I woke up to find Mark studying the book, and he read me passages about Adam the Second in which Soloveitchik characterizes his posture before Being as one of "defeat." I had read the book -- admittedly I kind of jammed through the second half of it on the plane out here -- but hadn't really picked up on the "defeat" aspect of Adam the Second's condition. This demands reflection. In some sense, it is not so different from the word "Islam," which literally means "submission," as opposed to "Jihad," or "struggle."

Just sayin.

Off the grid

On the way to Charleston yesterday, as you may have guessed, we stayed off of 95. Took 1 south to Southern Pines (where the team at Subway was exceptionally pleasant), then made our way to Georgetown on an array of smaller roads. Some of them much smaller, thanks to Sergei and Larry.

Mostly, the trek was not rewarded in terms of scenic beauty. A stultifyingly flat and lonely landscape of low economic activity, punctuated now and again with a Dollar General, a church, a truck, a cluster of ranch style houses. In one yard, a guy was driving a golf cart, for no apparent reason. But, on the other hand, the overall effect was that we left the Eastern Multiplex of big roads, warehouses, subdivisions, strip malls and chain restaurants for a few hours, so that when we re-entered it on the outskirts of Charleston, it was a little jarring.

And we got a clear view of the challenges, nay the near impossibilities, of leaving the places we passed through, and thereby an appreciation of how fortunate we are.

At many country crossroads there were signs advertising for high-speed internet. Access to it is by no means a foregone conclusion outside the Multiplex. I was reminded that, at the Person County Democratic meeting, there was a resolution read out, one that was making its way up from another local chapter, which talked about the import of high-speed internet for those in the countryside. It was filled with a great many "whereas" clauses ("whereas, access to the internet is indispensable to modern living...."), so it sounded very quaint. But it bespeaks a real and present need.

And now we are here. Outside it is cold and rainy. It is not supposed to be that, in lower South Carolina in late March, but what are you gonna do. Time to saddle up.

Gearing up

Getting packed to head out to Charleston, SC on Spring Break.  I may or may not be posting from the road, time will tell.

Was up in Roxboro last night with mom and Natalie at the Person County Democratic Convention. Each time I step out and get into this process, I learn a little more, but mostly I appreciate how much other people are doing. There is a small core cadre of people up there working hard, but much to do.

It was nice to let mom show Natalie where she grew up, though we were a little rushed.

My big mouth, as yet unopened

Yesterday evening I attended a fundraiser for Josh at the home of Bill Bell, the former mayor of Durham. I should say first off that the man's house was not ostentatious: there is not a hint that the man has had occasion or inclination to misuse public funds or influence thereover. He worked at IBM for a while, and then served the citizens of Durham for a couple of decades, and appears to live like an entirely normal person.

Secondly, it occurred to me that, as I spin wheels trying to figure out how to help the Democrats achieve goals in the 2018 cycle, specifically up in Person County where we are trying to help them win back District 2 for the NC General Assembly, rather than trying to pull rabbits from a hat in a place I don't know well, I should be thinking about raising money down here in Orange County, where there is more money to be raised. So maybe we do another event.

However, that will involve talking to Mary. Since we've done some work on the house, I ought to be able to pull it off, but I will tread gently for now.

Me and my big mouth

A non-profit on whose board I serve has some financial challenges (which doesn't?).  Legislation promulgated after another scandal won't let it pay its Executive Director properly (the E.D. is an MD), and its primary client, a division of the state of NC, is way behind in paying its bills. And there's other little stuff, mostly about cash flow and political challenges to the organization's ability to diversify its funding streams. I won't bore you with it.

The key thing is this: we haven't been good or aggressive about asking for money and building a donor base, and partly that's a function of not having learned to tell the organization's story. So I had the great idea of kicking off a fundraising campaign at the organization's big conference, which is in 5 weeks. And, in yesterday's board meeting, I led the discussion and said that the drive should be led by the Board, and that a member of the Board should address the conference. I was of course thinking that the Chairman would be the best person, as he has been leading the Board for many years now. But it turns out he has to go to Africa on work.

So guess who gets to make the speech?  If you guessed me, you win.

So, over the next five weeks or so, I have a fair amount of learning to do so I can make a rousing speech. I also need to get myself a new suit, something I have been meaning to do. I just hate going to the mall.

I also may end up calling up some individuals to ask for money, so don't be shocked if I call you.

Dailiness

I was just reading Nick Murray (as I do daily), in which he exhorts advisors to journal daily, on the grounds that it makes us better people. It was a goal of mine when I started this blog to write daily, and I did it for a while, then I trailed off a little, though my aggregate productiveness over these past 13-odd years is not bad. I've blogged on more than half the days.

Yesterday I'd say my most important lesson was around time management, and some of it was about my own productivity, some of it about observing someone else. I had a ton of things on my task list, as I always do. A colleague showed up unexpectedly at the office, and took me off on an abstract topic that really wasn't headed anywhere and really wasn't productive. Later in the day I got further insight into some really bad habits that lead to chronic underproduction, which cause me to focus more on what I should be doing: learning things that help me help others better, and connecting more with people whom I can help.  Also, continually focusing on limiting the number of things I'm involved in. I basically resigned from a board yesterday in an email. A board with an ill-defined mission, non-inspiring leadership, that just isn't doing much.

But I continue to try to ramp up on Democratic Party activity, in Person County specifically. And get home for dinner.

That's it.

Fire potential

Pretty much constantly, I find myself driving past piles of wood by the road from trees people cut down in their yards and thinking: "Free firewood! I ought to throw that in the back of the car and take it home to burn it."

The problem is, of course, that I am too lazy to actually make the fires. I kept the fireplace clean this year till after my fundraiser for Josh, and since then I have made maybe three fires. I keep finding myself in the rec room with Graham or Natalie watching TV rather than in the living room with Mary, watching a fire.

Fact is, the narratives of the two are more or less one and the same. It is just that TV excites more passion in the moment and offers one more to discuss, whereas fire expresses the essential truth.

Bureaucracy and spiritual progress

A couple of weeks ago I was at an Al Anon meeting, and we were reading from How Al Anon Works, a section which tells the tale of the early days of the fellowship. It was founded by Lois, who was married to Bill W, founder of AA. In the early days, it was just her and a few other wives of alcoholics, but then they started having groups and a small office for the national organization, and soon the small cadre found themselves dealing with massive volumes of correspondence and administrative work to support groups in formation around the country and figure out how to develop some basic reading materials, guidance, etc.

I was reminded of a thread I vaguely remembered from Juan Linz's Sociology of Religion course I took in 1986. This was not a class I did particularly well in or took particularly seriously. But I did take a couple of things from it, namely volumes I and II of Max Weber's monumental Economy and Society. These are dense and daunting tomes, the reading of which did not really match up well with my somewhat indisciplined way of life in college.

But I took certain key things away from the course. Foremost amongst them is the idea that baseline religious worldviews permeate everything we do, and that, in Weber's view, there was something special about Protestantism (and Judaism) that seemed to account for their success in forming societies which generated wealth. And that bureaucracy, to the extent that it facilitated a diffuse, abstract, rational and granular division of labor across an ever more abstract economy, was good, the embodiment of rationalization. And that the monasteries of the Middle Ages played a key role in the preformation of modern bureaucracy.

Some of this I may have imagined. I now just pulled the books off the shelf and pawed through the tables of contents, then looked at the Wikipedia article on Weber. Each is enough to make your eyes glaze over.

In any event, to bring it back home, my point is this: it was the belief in an idea, in the case of Al Anon the idea that alcoholism is primarily a family disease, at first the idea that an alcoholic's behavior fucks up a family and makes family members crazy, later the idea that dysfunctional and destructive behavioral patterns are learned by successive generations of families within which substance abuse dominates and are passed on, it was the belief in this idea that drove Lois W and her early team members to sit down and do a bunch of tedious work that eventually evolved into something that has persisted and done a lot of good. The belief in an idea let them suck it up and grind on through boredom, and this grinding was, in some sense, holy.