The Month That Was - November 2020

I'm very late this month.  Travelling post Thanksgiving.  More to say about that next month.  

The first snow.  We had a couple of 70 degree days early in the month, and a couple of 60 degree days before Thanksgiving, but from now on it's nothing but cold. Part of me misses the years past when I could spend Thanksgiving betting football in Vegas and adventuring around the Southwest. I note a low level hum of concern in the air for what the combination of winter doldrums and social restrictions will do to mental health in general.  

For the longest time I had dreams of spending winters somewhere there was no winter.  Now I am more sanguine about the prospects. This is due to being a homeowner.  Winter is a multi-month respite from yard work.  Also the swarms of stink bugs and yellowjackets that plague the fall are gone.  A big part of mental health is finding reasons to be grateful.

Another good thing:  I think I have found my way around the fundamental conceptual hole in my latest manuscript.  It will take a bit of rework, but not as much as I had feared.

[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 9

[Rant, TV] Last Days of Cablerant-tv-last-days-of-cable.html

[Rant, Tech] Amazon Flood

[Covid 9] Coronatime, Month 9

This was paradigmatic good news and bad news month.  The bad news is the infection rate is soaring (yes, it may partially be because testing is way more common).  Worse, hospitalizations and deaths are rising although not as fast.  As is typical, everybody is blaming the "second wave" on the behavior of people they don't like. These second waves cross national and cultural boundaries.  If you think a certain behavior changed from the summer when things were getting better, and changed across many places in the world simultaneously, I suppose it's plausible.  I continue to believe that we are overstating the effect of our behavior on the infection rate and that we like it mostly because it let's us demonize The Other.  In any event, there is nothing close to comprehensive data, nevermind proof, of anything at this point.  The CDC now seems to think that most transmissions come from asymptomatic carriers.  How can you fight that?  Test everyone, every day, all the time?  Shut down everything?  Even if you could survive the economic disaster, no one would stand for it.  A solution that is not politically palatable is not a solution.

The good news is vaccines are coming and coming for real if we can believe our eyes. Big Pharma (both Pfizer and Modena), the political punching bag, seems to have come through.  And not in a small way.  For context, we have never successfully created a vaccine against a coronavirus before.  Since the common cold is a coronavirus, I would speculate that there have probably been close to a century's worth of attempts.  We have also never created an MRNA vaccine before -- an entirely new method of triggering the immune system versus the old way of infecting cells with an inert version of the virus as an immune system trigger.  Lost in all the sound and fury is how remarkable this is.  It's moonshot level stuff.  Do not underestimate what an incredible scientific achievement has just occurred. Not only that, there are also traditional vaccines coming on line (the famous Oxford vaccine and others).  In less than a year an intractable problem was solved using a new technology, just because it had to be solved. The next time someone asks why they don't have a flying car, point to this.

Of course, there are blemishes in our silver lining.  Specifically, it seems these vaccines are getting slowed by FDA bureaucracy who can't manage to push paperwork as fast as scientists can solve problems. I have no idea if cold analysis done after this is all over will indicate that we did the best we could.  But I feel confident that our regulators are going to come out of this looking pretty bad.  The nth degree of safety our agencies enforce may yield benefits to our lives in normal circumstances, but it's clear our judgement fails when assessing risk to ease regulations in times of crisis. (It appears the Pfizer vaccine is already approved in the U.K.)

[Rant, TV] The Last Days of Cable

I continue to struggle with what to do about cable TV.  I know the hip thing to do is "cut the cord" and use streaming services and I'm close to that, but I'm still not sure it's as big a money saver everyone thinks it is.  To reasonably mimic cable TV you would have to sign up for a broad-based non-premium channels service like Sling.  Then add $10-ish a month each for a handful of premiums.  Even then you lose your DVR. 

The topic of DVR replacement is interesting.  I don't know how much I'd use it if most everything is streaming.  I usually use it for series recordings to catch new episodes of shows I like, mostly on non-premium channels.  From what I gather, if you subscribe to a premium channel like HBO Max, everything is there all the time, it doesn't disappear.  That leaves shows on FX and AMC that I usually DVR.  Not sure how to address that yet.

So what would my viewing life look like if I cut the cord? Spectrum internet (really the only quality choice in my area).  I'd need a non-premium provider. Intriguingly, YouTube is starting a non-premuim service, YouTubeTV, and as much as I am loathe to give yet more of my money to the tech giants (YouTube is Google is Alphabet), it looks pretty solid, even providing a cloud DVR. Then for premiums I would have Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBOMax (I may have to ditch my Roku for that), Disney+.

Here's the rub:  I'm not sure how much this saves me.  Meanwhile, it puts me in the position of being at the pricing and policy mercy of that many more masters.  There exists the option for a potential half-step; to cut down to basic cable, then pick up premiums as I need them.  It's all so confusing AND I'M JUST A POOR, OLD MAN WHO WANTS TO WATCH HIS STORIES!   

One of the oh so delightful things I can do now is calculate lifetime savings.  I mean let's say I have 20 years of TV watching left.  If I can save $25 per month, that amounts to a lifetime savings of $6000 dollars.  I could own my home three month sooner.  I could buy one-tenth of a new car when I'm 80 with my savings and drive it 30mph on the highway.  When you start thinking like that it kind of puts things in perspective.  Still, I plan to obsess about this for a while.  You are warned.

[Rant, Tech] Amazon Flood

Amazon continues to amaze.  The NYT notes that they have hired over 425,000 employees this year.  That is truly astonishing.  You have to go back to WW2 to find hiring at that rate.  Amazon now has approximately 1.3 million employees.  When you add in another half a million contractors they are fast approaching Walmart as the largest U.S. employer. (Note: the Federal Government employs a little over 2 million, but if you throw in employees of Federal Government contractors, everyone else is a dust speck.) 

Walmart aside, the retail industry has little hope but to play along and at least have an option to sell through Amazon.  In other words, give tribute to The Crown.  It's interesting to ask what sort of retailers have the ability to hold out.  Let's see:

1. Anything you have to touch or try in person: Clothes, Furniture, etc.  Oh you can go to a real-life store and try things out, then go order them from Amazon, but that's not the smooth experience Amazon needs to stay ahead.  Also, you'll feel like a douche if you use a retailer as an Amazon showroom, and you should.  The retailer goes to a lot of expense to keep employees in the store. If you use them and then order on Amazon to save a few dollars you should feel guilty.  This needs to be a cultural norm.

2. Special assistance for complicated decision making.  Very important as we age and tech gets away from us.  The archetype here is the oldster who needs help with registering a new phone, or unnecessarily complicated sales processes like leasing a car. 

3. The product provides a cultural experience or status upgrade.  Apple for instance.  Even if Apple doesn't sell through Amazon (although I think they do, sort of) people will still buy Apple products -- either at the Apple website or in an Apple retail store. They need Apple for self-fulfillment more than they need convenience.  (Interesting note: airpods -- those white, dangly, Apple wireless earbuds, were they a standalone business would be the single hottest start-up in silicon valley. I'm going to have to write an essay on Apple and why I don't like it.)

There are probably others, but in the overwhelming majority of purchases, it's Convenience Uber Alles and Amazon wins.  

The other arae in which Amazon is the 900 lb. gorilla is cloud services.  This is mostly hidden from the public at large, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest vendor of back-end services for the cloud.  All that stuff you do that is now in "the cloud" -- meaning you access it through a browser or your phone exists on servers owned and run by Amazon.

You begin to see what an immensely powerful position they are in.  They control the front end and the back end of the bulk of commerce in the U.S. and much of the First World.  

I don't know how all this plays out.  Generally when companies get this big they butt heads with Government.  Cynics will say that the Government reacts to being threatened or simply wants tribute.  The naive say that at that size, they are too important to society not to face control and oversight.  Whatever the case, Amazon is on the fast track there.  "There" could be anything from an antitrust breakup to an East India Company style accommodation.  

It's also worth noting that Amazon is not (yet) all powerful.  Though AWS is the big gun, it faces stiff competition from Microsoft's Azure product, Microsoft being able to leverage their greater power in corporate infrastructure.   Their streaming services, while solid, aren't crushing the likes of Spotify or Netflix, although if they decide to truly leverage their Prime subscribers they could dominate.  Also, has Spotify ever turned a profit?  Their hardware ventures -- Fire phones and tablets -- are almost a joke, which is odd as you would think they could leverage Kindle to that end.  The Whole Foods and Washington Post purchases seem barely coherent at this point.

It's going to be fascinating to see this play out. By the way, I am generally a fan of Amazon.  I think for the most part they have done far more good than evil in the world and I would not want to go back to pre-Amazon times.

The Month That Was - October 2020

 Eight months into the pandemic and find I am fully used to the current state of affairs: Mask wearing inside in public, working from home, making other relatively minor concessions to the pandemic life. I have begun to wonder if I will ever "go back" to work in the way I had done most of my life. In my company it is forbidden to return to the office until January at the soonest, and even then there will be options and possibly outright disincentives to cube-dwelling.  It will be a very strange atmosphere for the final 5-ish years of my working life.  

The good news is I finished revision 3 of my latest book and am now on to revision 4.  The bad news is that I found a key flaw in the fundamental premise.  Fixing that is what revision 4 will be.  Ten steps forward, nine steps back, but I do finally have the sense that I might actually finish it one day.

[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 8

[TV] Toob Notes

[Rant] Where in the World

[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 8

 This is the best article I've read about the current state of knowledge.  We seem to be zeroing on the idea that this virus spreads in bursts, not in a steady manner.  In fact, there is mention that there seem to be individuals who, possible for physiological reasons, are especially contagious.  Place one of these people in the right setting -- indoors, crowded, loud talking/singing, extended proximity -- and you have a superspreader event. 

It's not clear anything about this knowledge would change our strategy.  If these especially contagious people exist, we have no way to identify them.  And most places have restrictions in place against all that superspreader required behavior.  

But it does suggest that the odd protestor refusing to wear a mask in the grocery store is not such a big deal and we could chill about that a bit.  (Tyler Cowen suggests we stop moralizing; good luck with that.)  Perhaps more importantly, it suggests that is a large element of chance in outbreaks.  That is to say, a loud Irish pub could go weeks or months without any trouble, but one superspreader walks in and the whole neighborhood could be infected.  That's not a particularly satisfying explanation of the heterogeneity of the epidemic (the data is so contradictory actionable conclusions are rare) but it might be what we got.  

The good news is that re-infection looks to be exceedingly rare and possibly only occur in extenuating circumstances.

Herd immunity has not really been found in any documentable way.  Every time we think we have found some population that should have achieved it, they have another outbreak.  So we can only wait for a vaccine.  It also appears the vaccines will have to come from overseas, since we (the U.S.) seem incapable of reducing our onerous standards of safety, despite the urgency of the situation.  If there is a lesson from this, it is that we have lost our ability to assess risk in any constructive manner.  Maybe everyone should spend more time in Vegas.

[TV] Toob Notes

Fargo -- the latest season seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the original movie, and that's fine.  It tries to find the same tone as the movie and it somewhat succeeds -- a bit of a surrealistic take on organized (and disorganized) crime in a cold midwestern town (Kansas City this time) with lots of quirky characters and ironic plot twists.  Solid entertainment but the series is starting to feel a little cookie-cutter-ish.

The main plotline centers around a turf war between Black and Italian crime gangs.  Naturally all sides justify their sociopathic behavior with historical grievance sob stories.  More interestingly, while the Italians are standard mafia types, the blacks are all thoughtful, well-spoken, and simply profit oriented. That may be an attempt to counter a typical black stereotype for reasons of principal or practicality -- avoiding triggering the very grievances the show celebrates. Somewhere I read the comment that the black characters on the show behave more like Jews. Maybe it was originally written for Jews but they decided it would be better to have people of color.  Such is the deconstruction we now have to consider in 2020.

I have issues with the casting.  I find neither Chris Rock or Jason Schwartzman are particularly convincing mob bosses.  But Jessie Buckley as a serial killer nurse and Salvatore Esposito as a sadistic goodfella are excellent, as is the ever reliable Timothy Oliphant as a Mormon badass.  In any event, you could find worse things to watch, and you probably will.

Archer -- For its first couple of seasons Archer was one of the funniest shows on TV, ever.  If I ever get around to creating a pantheon of TV comedy, Archer would be on it.  But like many shows it degraded over the years as the writers ran out of ideas and plots and themes became ever more far-fetched -- dream sequence seasons, outer space adventures, etc.  Some of these, apart from feeling desperate, simply weren't funny.   The current season is a return to form in both format and quality.  The general theme is that the team finally became somewhat functional, sane, and accomplished...then Archer himself returns and drags everyone back into dysfunction and insanity.  It is unapologetically beautiful.

Nero Wolfe Mysteries -- Some of you may remember from years ago the Nero Wolfe mysteries starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton that aired on A&E just after the turn of the century.  They were clever, stylish, perfectly paced, and brilliantly acted.  It perfectly captures the feel of the original mysteries in that, as someone pointed out elsewhere, they are really drawing room escapades disguised as mysteries.  

Interestingly the casting was troupe-based.  The main characters were fixed, but remaining characters were played by the same set of (very capable) actors in different roles each episode.  It gave it more of a sense of repertory theatre. It lasted two seasons of less than 12ish episodes then, as Maury Chaykin said, "[A]t the time A&E was transforming from the premier intellectual cable network in America to one that airs Dog the Bounty Hunter on repeat, so it was never promoted and eventually went off the air." 

I don't believe it is streaming legitimately anywhere, but there are (probably illegitimate) full episodes on YouTube although the audio seems to cut in and out on them occasionally.  They are still worth watching.  A delightful escape to that rare moment in history when TV had ambitions of quality.

[Rant] Where in the World

One of the interesting developments of the pandemic is the new acceptance level for remote work.  This has the potential to have a huge effect on the geographics.  Take NYC for example.  It is a huge financial and real estate center and a high visibility locale for company headquarters.  Another way of saying that is there a lot of people in offices and cube farms working on their computers and having meetings.  Well I can now work on my computer and meet with you from pretty much anywhere in the world.  This has been the case for a while but there was huge uncertainty about how effective and productive we would be in the absence of face-to-face contact.  After months of having been forced to work remotely general consensus is that it can be very effective and productive.  Personally, I remain suspicious that there may be problems yet to be discovered. I find it works well when I have a pre-existing real world relationship, less well when I do not.

The other thing folks will have discovered is that it can be a lot cheaper.  If I really need an NYC address, it's a lot cheaper to hang a shingle somewhere and have my employees work from their basements in a Smalltown, Midwest than lease five floors of an office building in Manhattan.  Or maintain a sprawling modern campus in Silicon Valley for that matter.

The social outcomes of all this I will leave for another time.  The question I'm posing is given you can work from anywhere now, where should you live?

If you are young and ambitious, I still think there is value in living in an area filled with other young and ambitious people.  The opportunity to do real-life socializing and networking with like-minded people still has value. The aforementioned Silicon Valley is the former paradigm for this. Silicon Valley is, however, too damn expensive and has probably peaked in that sense.  My first suggestion is Texas.  Texas is rising, and not just Austin.  The Houston-Austin-San Antonio triangle is rapidly becoming the premier commercial heart of the country.  Having spent some time there, I can tell you that the growth of the area is astounding, and that they are handling it infrastructure-wise much better than many other places.  If I was a recent college grad, that's where I would go.  Other similar choices would be the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and western cities of Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.  

What if you are older and settled into your career and industry? The palette for this group is wider and more diverse.  Quality of life becomes more important.  You know all those articles about "The Best Places to Live"?  Well you can actually consider some of these. Here you can look for the paradigmatic low crime/good schools area and match it with your leisure activities -- near water, in the mountains, where there are great restaurants, entertainment, weather, political atmosphere, etc.  I would bet that in most cases, unless you're trying to make a socio-political point, this will not be a big city.  Check out this list of the fastest growing cities in the U.S.  It is not surprisingly Texas-heavy, but note that 2 of the top 10 are in Idaho.  I have only been to Idaho once, for the eclipse, and I am not familiar with the two names on the list, but I can verify that Ketchum, where I stayed, and its funky neighbor over the mountain, Stanley, would be terrific places to live (at least in the warm months).  You can bet that these sorts of cities will grow faster because you no longer have to commit to leaving the rat race to live there; you can keep in touch with the other rats via your basement office.

Although I am barreling ever more quickly to retirement, I find myself in exactly this situation.  I am fortunate in that I love where I live (Dexter, MI) and wouldn't think twice about recommending it (again, mind your tolerance for cold winters).  In fact, there are any number of small towns peppered along the Great Lakes coast that would be wonderful for quality of life.  

The other region I am familiar with is the desert West.  Moab, UT would be a great place, economically insulated as it is by the surrounding National Parks.  St. George, UT for similar reasons along with its proximity to Vegas.  Many places in Utah would fit the bill -- like Idaho, Utah should benefit from all this.

The Florida Gulf, and to some extent the areas surrounding Orlando have good qualities but there are the wild cards of tourists and retirees that can disrupt the steadiness of things at times.  Also the summer heat takes some getting used to.

It's going to be fascinating to watch the shifts in geographic demography in the upcoming years.

Retirement locales are another matter entirely.  Low taxes and good health infrastructure are key attributes in this case.  That's why I've zeroed in on Florida.  But I don't see that changing due to the increase in remote work.

I mentioned before that when we emerge from the pandemic we may find ourselves in a new Roaring Twenties.  One of the characteristics of it might be a realignment from city orientation to regional orientation; a move from the celebration of the intensity and conflict of urban life to the serenity and spirit of more open spaces.  That'd be nice.

The Month That Was - September 2020

Bluntly put, I turned 60 this month. I suppose I should have something of great gravity to say, but I don’t think I do. Follow up is below.

Here at summer’s end (summer the season, not the summer of my life, although that too) I find myself generally pleased with how I spent the warm months. I spent a good deal of time outside. A lot of exercise. A couple of trips. I have too few summers left to waste any.

One bad thing is that the pandemic completely disrupted my already weak writing habit. It seems like it would be a trivial thing to fix. The place I did all my writing previously is unavailable to me now, so I need to find somewhere to replace it. The problem is that I treat excuses not to write like most people treat excuses not to exercise. That is to say, the lamest one is good enough. This is job one for me at this point. Build a new writing habit.

[Rant] 60
[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 7
[Good Links] Fallback Links

[Rant] 60

I'm a little disappointed I don't have more to say about turning 60. I went back ten years ago to look at what I wrote here. A couple of quotes:

I can honestly say the cliche applies to me: I'm in the best shape of my life

I can't say that is still the case -- ten years have taken their toll -- but I am still in very good shape and very healthy, especially for someone my age. Still, I have to acknowledge there are peaks I will never again achieve and capabilities lost forever. There are mornings when I wake up so stiff I literally can't bend over far enough to put on pants (lucky I'm working from home, eh?); it eases up with a few minutes of movement. And lord knows I value a nap ever higher. I think the best response to these things is, to some extent, ignore them. I may not be able to do certain things anymore, but I need to behave like I can. Although I often kid around about being an old man, the real danger is that I let that become an excuse for inactivity, at which point it becomes self-fulling. I lose my health because I am convinced I am losing my health. It's not really rational, but I think it's my best shot to behave as if I can achieve new heights, even if I know I can't.

The question that manifests: "Is that all there is?" Not asked in the sense of disappointment and disillusionment with how life has turned out. Just the opposite, in fact. Said out of fear that the best times may be gone, never to return. You just don't see anything like those cherished moments of real joy in the future. "Is that it? Don't I get more?"

I still have this fear, but it is tempered by the knowledge that in the ten years since I wrote it I have still had great and wonderful times. At some point it will be true, that the good times are gone forever. But it wasn't the case ten years ago, and I don't think it will be the case over the next ten years.

Bottom line: I'm 50. It hurts a bit, but I'll live.

I'm 60 and it hurts both a little more and a little less. I have that much more behind me and that much less ahead, but I‘m confident that I will be grateful for that which is ahead.

[Covid19] Coronatime Month 7

More and more we are accommodating the new normal.  It's truly amazing how adaptable human beings are and how relative our perceptions of happiness and value are.  The fact is things are dribbling back excruciatingly slowly.  I can now go to the gym legally, as opposed to going illegally as I was for a while.  There are still a handful of things I can't do.  The library is still closed, which I find to be a much greater loss than I realized as that was where I did most of my writing.  And of course attending live sporting events is out, although sports has become so politicized I have trouble even watching an NFL game. 

I also grow weary of any coverage of the virus.  Long ago it became swamped by signaling. There is precious little actual knowledge.  All suppositions, even the most reasonable, have data contradicting them.  Eggheads call this heterogeneity.  But it basically means we have got it figured out yet.  Not that that will stop anyone accusing the other tribe of evil and stupidity.  

The good news is that vaccinations are progressing, although not at the pace they should be.  We are very good at having regulations keeping everyone safe.  We are very bad at determining when these regulations need to be eased in a crisis. 

I gather about 100,000 small businesses have shuttered permanently.  Given where we are now, with mask requirements and limiting large groups seems to have stemmed the tide of deaths and hospitalizations, the question has to be raised as to whether the forced shutdowns of businesses were really necessary.  Remember our initial reaction was that masks were ineffective and we had to shelter-in-place.  Maybe we didn't.  Maybe if we went straight to masks and reduced group sizes we would have been no worse off and lost many fewer businesses and not suffered such an economic hit. 

But again, we just don't know.  It is possible that there will be some point in the future where the data have been poured over and deep analysis has taken place and we do gain some measure of confidence about how the virus functioned and what worked and what didn't.  Let's hope some level heads are able to incorporate that information into our future responses, because we know the bulk of people won't believe it if it contradicts their current beliefs.

I begin to wonder how it all ends.  Can anyone actually picture a politician saying: "The crisis is over.  Take off your masks.  Go to your bars and clubs and football games.  Shake hands and stand shoulder to shoulder again."?

Lastly, under the heading of I'm-sticking-to-my-story, when this first started seven months ago and comparisons were being made to the 1918 flu epidemic, I pointed out that once the epidemic subsided we were not left in some sort of post-apocalyptic hell.  In fact, we stepped into the roaring twenties, one of the most lucrative and creative eras in U.S. history.  Well, we now have word that there may actually be nuclear fusion on the horizon (I know you've heard that before), and we have learned much about molecular biology and viruses in particular, and breakthrough in battery tech, and more importantly we have had some of our planted assumptions deeply questioned -- the value of college in general and on-site education in particular, and any conventional mediums of art have been upended in so many ways.  Now if we could only recover our senses of humor and perspective, things could get really lit up in here (...said the old man).

[Good Links] Fallback Links

In addition to not writing, I'm not really reading. Or watching movies. Or TV. Honestly, I've begun to wonder what is happening to my days. Am I spending too much time on the internet? Possibly, although I think I am better than most at finding worthwhile content to read. Am I just staring into space? Also possible, although more likely it involves napping rather than staring. I kinda want to change this but I also know that sometimes such behavior needs to run its course as it is often indicative of a change in desires that I haven't fully processed.

Which is all just a long-winded way of saying I'm going to do a link dump on you rather than write something longer. Maybe you're grateful?

• If you are interested in music discovery across both genre and geography, you could do worse than keeping up with Ted Gioia. Here are his music recommendations so far this year. You can search his website for past years. Note these are not links to the popular streaming services, which I believe he abhors. You have to search for the artist title on the service of your choice if you want to stream and often they are not available. For the musically curious, it's worth the effort.


• I don't know where I stumbled on the BabelColour twitter feed, by Stuart Humpheys, but it's astounding. If you're not on twitter, congratulations! Here is his portfolio on Insta. This fellow takes century-old color photos -- yes there are many such things -- that have flaws and blemishes and blurs and generally washed out colors, and he restores them, but does not colorize them. The colors are original, just enhanced. I am amazed how much this editing turns the subjects of these photos from relics into real living people.

  Maybe it's just me, but old photos in black & white or weak color leave me feeling that the past was two dimensional or incompletely drawn; as if the people in the pictures were simple constructs instead of actual human beings with full lives, this in turn leaves me feeling unrelated to the past instead of a product of it. This sensation is probably worthy of a full essay if I can ever sort my feelings about it out. In any event, check out Stuart's work.

• K-Pop is Korean Pop Music. It is a huge thing in many Asian countries, both as music and as culture. It consists of either all male or all female groups, all members in their early twenties and all members looking like fashion models. None of them play instruments. If you remember the boy bands of the nineties, their personas are something like that, although the band members are more numerous, some over a dozen. The music is a pastiche of hip-hop, pop, dubstep. Dormin takes a deep dive into it.

  The whole musical experience is corporation manufactured -- that is to say, as the article points out, there is no pretense of authenticity. The article also points to a dark side -- financial (and possibly sexual) exploitation of the young. Although financial exploitation is pretty standard in the music industry, not specific to k-pop. Sexual exploitation, or at least the appearance of sexual exploitation, is pretty common in the entertainment world, as we have seen -- again, not specific to k-pop. The kids are worked hard, physically hard, through years of tryouts and auditions and competitions to finally get in a group, but probably no harder than any athletes or dancers have to work to reach the top of their profession. The upshot is that the accusations of exploitation need to be considered in the context of the wider world. Still it's a fascinating look into one particularly successful corner of the music industry. I admit some of the videos are very striking. I can see why tweens and teens would go for it. I probably would too, just like I fell for the Monkees as a child.

The Month That Was - August 2020

Michigan was hot, so I visited Houston and then the Florida Gulf which put Michigan's heat into perspective. Otherwise, most everything continues apace. I continue to work from home. I continue to be frustrated by the two or three things I used to do, but cannot due to lockdown. I continue to be grateful that they are minor and I am, so far, weathering all this pretty well.

Yet with each passing day, I know I am drawn closer to inevitable changes. Retirement, relocation, and a broad set of adaptations that will have to come. In fact, there is an underlying hum of retirement in the posts this month. There is meaning in that, I'm sure.

For now I am still physically fit and financially sound and trying to live the smartest way I can.

[Ann Arbor] College Town Blues
[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 6
[Good Links] Think Links

[Ann Arbor] College Town Blues

I have benefitted my entire adult life from living in Ann Arbor. The behemoth University of Michigan creates an economic bubble that has insulated me from the sorts of upheavals that have destroyed other smallish cities that are built around a single sugar daddy industry. Now there are major questions whether a big University will be able to do that going forward.

There are real questions being raised about the value of being on-site. Online services have boomed in many situations, not just retail. I have purchased a car online, although I had to do the paperwork in person. I have never met my financial advisor in real life. Remote work has been an ongoing debate for some time in an office setting, and now the questions are being extended to higher education (and lower education, for that matter). It is no secret that, along with health care and housing, higher education is the main source of whatever inflation we experience. The costs of college have grown enormously faster than other sectors of the economy and have well outpaced wages, in no small part this has been fueled by student loans.

It's also not just tuition. The cost of dormitory housing is also soaring. Yelling at clouds: Back in my day, the dorm cafeteria was a slightly larger version of a high school cafeteria with gruff lunch ladies and industrial quality foodstuff which was most effective as a projectile. Here is the website for University of Michigan dining halls. For a sample, here's the description of the South Quad dining hall:

Enjoy a tapas style meal at South Quad, where ten mini restaurants are serving up a wide variety of cuisines. Make your own burrito bowl at Sabroso, grab some stir-fry at Two Oceans, or pick up some Mediterranean from Olive Branch - this is just a small fraction of what's available. Look out for the halal dining station as well!

Again, that's the cafeteria in an undergraduate dormitory. And we all know about the horrendous, scandalous racket that is the college textbook market. Acknowledging that higher education is a bubble has become old hat.

So how does remote work affect that? Well, can you charge the same tuition for a remote class that you can for a real one? Some colleges will be trying. Others are going back to real life classes and rolling the dice that there won't be a terrible outbreak. From a strictly educational point of view, some have pointed out that for the price of a high end undergraduate program, you could hire adjuncts as tutors and get individual attention rather than be a lost face in a 200-student lecture hall for about the same price. One thing we will probably discover is how much of the value of college comes from direct access to teachers, peer networking, the overall college atmosphere (not just partying, but building social skills), status and credentialing, etc.

Still the overall question is Are we nearing the bursting of the higher ed bubble? The follow up question is, How will all this affect me?

You could argue the bubble has already burst. Many small colleges -- mostly liberal arts schools -- are in danger or have already given up the ghost. This informative Twitter thread gives a good, pessimistic, summary of how badly snookered universities are financially. I'm going to have to assume the golden age of cash-flooded universities is over.

As for how all this affects me, well, the University of Michigan has a bit of a buffer due to it's huge position in medical research. I don't see that cash flow dropping too much. But for all my adult life I have benefitted from something like 100,000 mostly upper middle class kids invading my city for 8 months out of the year and dropping a ton of their parents money, with an added bonus of another, oh, 50,000 or so on 7 or 8 football Saturdays in the fall. It's unclear how much of that will dry up.

It's possible that other industries will pick up the slack, but that too is dicey. Ann Arbor industries are heavily skewed to engineering and white-collar professions, that means they will be increasingly decentralized and, in fact, having a corporate office in a city may do little or nothing for the local economy.

If things do go bad, where it will hit me is in my house. I bought my house primarily as an investment. It's certainly increased in value, although not so much as I had hoped. But were push come to shove and I to sell it today, I might make a bit of money on even considering interest payments over the years. I suspect my return would keep me up with inflation. I had hoped to keep it another 5 years before I downsize. Through that time, if it acts as a store of value, if not profit, I will declare success. (Note that by store of value I mean the cash I get back covers everything I paid in over the course of 15 years -- mostly principal and interest -- and keeps up with inflation, which has been for the duration of my ownership. Effectively that means I had zero housing costs for 15 years.) A big dip in housing prices would kill that. Not the end of the world. It's not like my house will be worthless, but it would be a hit.

I may be rationalizing, but I don't yet think it's time to head for the hills. Ann Arbor is pretty resilient and in fact, a couple of zero growth years or even some downsizing wouldn't be the end of the world. It may perhaps be long run positive. Ann Arbor has weathered bad years in the past, before the university boom times of the last thirty years, better than most of the rest of the country. So I think I'll hold on for now. Still, I remain less comfortable than I was.

[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 6

I am going to try to be shorter and unranty this month because I have little new to say, other than I continue to think I am right about masks being less important that everyone thinks. (Notice how I didn't say not important, I said less important than everyone thinks.) Data is coming in to suggest that is so.

This twitter thread finds from looking at Louisiana that mask mandates didn't seem to have much effect. Reading between the lines also notes that popular perception of mandates differs from reality. Places that are spoken of as having differing mandates often have the same mandates. That is to say, people are assuming the place with the lower infection rate has tougher mandates, when in fact they are identical. Cart before horse. Again, not that masks aren't important, just that a small percentage of people engaged in silly protests doesn't really matter.

This egghead paper based on mounds of data worldwide comes to the conclusion that what they call NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention), that is to say masks and distancing and lockdowns, has had minimal effect on the growth of fatalities, and they actually hint that there is something else at play -- something unknown.

I am as guilty as the next person is of promoting that which proves me right, and this is what I have been going on about for the past three months.

Also, here is an FAQ on aerosol transmission, which appears to be the primary path of transmission, which is why we are all wearing masks. A key passage:

Clearly there is aerosol transmission in shared rooms, as has occurred in many superspreading events. But a very clear pattern emerges, that indoors is needed for superspreading, and it is helped by long time, crowding, low ventilation, no masks, and talking and especially singing / yelling. E.g. lots of outbreaks occur in choirs / bars / meat packing with high attack rates, but none have been reported, (to our knowledge) in Japan's subways, or in movie theaters where there is almost no talking and better ventilation.

I'm probably going to get on a hobby horse about widely installing HEPA filters in ventilation systems as a thing that would deeply reduce the likelihood of superspreading. Seems like a simple thing that would give us a lot more flexibility in what activities we can do safely and what businesses could be reopened.

One last comment. For those that think the rush to open up is just about money or convenience, the shutdown (and probably the riots) are taking a huge toll on people prone to anxiety or depression, including people I care deeply about. We should not be casual and flippant about re-opening, but neither should we about the restrictions.

[Good Links] Think Links

All these links are worthy of a slice of brainpower.

1. This is a clever breakdown of how the two sides filter identical facts to mean what they want it to, in this case the Kenosha shooting. This is not done with evil intent (for the most part), it is done unconsciously and out of virtue, yet it is still dangerous. Did you adopt either of these views? Will you rethink?
2. This is a bit heavy on jargon, but it's a good summary of the current thinking on longevity. I keep hoping these folks make real progress in time for me to use it.
3. I have mentioned that most of my friends are liberal and most of those are atheists (or at least only vaguely spiritual). Were any of them open to seeing Christianty as something other than sneerworthy, I would point them here for the latest thoughtful takes.
4. Relevant to both the Coronatime and College Town posts this month, Robin Hanson peers into the future of how all this will play out. I find nothing in this to disagree with.

The Month That Was - July 2020

I've been counting blessings. In fact, there is a post below solely dedicated to that. As a result I think I am emerging from my depressive, negative state of the last couple of months. I actually got revision 3 of my latest manuscript roughed out, so that was promising. I got back to the gym very briefly, until it was shut down again.

In any event, I'll let my blessings post speak for itself. There is a possibility that my imminent 60th birthday is having some negative effect on my psyche, but that's really never been the case with milestone birthdays before. Despite the size of that number, I honestly believe I can still do whatever I want in this world. Or at least, whatever pandemic protocol allows.

[Rant] Blessings
[TV] Sad State of the Toob
[Covid19, Rant] Coronatime, Month 5
[Tech, Rant] Defending Facebook

[Rant] Blessings

Amid all my whining over the last couple of months I have tried to keep in mind how immeasurably lucky I am. One side effect of disagreeing with much of the pandemic reaction -- and much of everything in the world, for that matter -- is that people think you are complaining about your own life. Nothing could be further from the truth for me.

• I have suffered no financial difficulty yet.
• I can work almost seamlessly from home.
• The work I do hasn't taken a huge hit in demand so I am under no urgent risk of losing my job.
• In fact, I'm saving money -- lighter travel expenses, no gym membership, gas purchases down -- I even refinanced my house thanks to the drop in interest rates.
• Even my retirement savings, which I fretted for in the initial market crash, has recovered to almost where it was before.
• I've been able to stay active.
• I've gained a real appreciation for my home, as much as it tasks me.
• I live in a beautiful, upscale, semi-rural area of the sort most people only dream of.
• My home office has a window, my office office doesn't.
• I am amazed at the amount of wildlife surrounding me -- deer, bunnies, chipmunks, woodchucks, toads, snakes, and turkeys have wandered through my backyard, most knocking on the glass to my office window in curiosity.
• Nearby I have seen beautiful cranes, vultures, and even a bald eagle. I have heard foxes yapping in the night. Big, striking black and white dragonflies buzz around everywhere. My flowers are swamped with bumble bees.
• There are probably about a mile or two of maintained trails in my neighborhood that wind through wooded areas and wetlands. I have been going for frequent walks, a thing I never used to do.
• My options for outdoor recreation are equally wonderful. There are endless trails, paved and unpaved for running, roads paved and unpaved for biking, lakes for swimming. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface -- all within a short drive.

Oh sure, I could list the annoyances and disappointments, but they would be small in comparison. I could also recite my substantial fears for the future, but they would all be speculative.

The ancient advice to count your blessings hasn't survived the centuries for nothing. It's a good thing to do. Often. Like, every time you open Twitter.

[TV] Sad State of the Toob

TV is bad again. I mean bad in the way of fifty years ago, when we referred to it as a vast wasteland. Game shows have made a comeback, and not game shows like Jeopardy; game shows like contestants fall into a vat of lard over canned laughter and commentary from a smug, insipid host. There are no high concept dramas, nobody seems to think that deeply anymore. There is no humanity in anything; nothing is personal, everything is social, or worse, political. There are no characters, only amalgams of ideologies and shallow habits. There are no timeless themes, only reflections of headlines. Comedy has pretty much ceased to exist; we're really not allowed to laugh at anything anyway.

All this occurred to me as I was watching HBOs latest drama, Perry Mason. For you young'uns, Perry Mason was a courtroom drama show back in the '60s. Mason defended a (falsely accused, of course) client of the week in what was reasonable quality, if highly formulaic, drama for the time. Actually the character goes back to a series of potboilers written by Earle Stanley Gardner in the '30s. HBO's series is supposed to be something of an origin story. We start with Mason as bum, scraping by as a private eye. In the course of the series, the father figure lawyer he works for dies and Mason is compelled to scam his way into passing the bar exam and stepping in as a replacement lawyer for a client that is being railroaded.

It's not a bad show. The production values are far beyond the old TV series, of course. It's a solid attempt at grit and character building in a period drama. It has the correct positive references to alternate sexuality and racial injustice along with the negative views of religion and authority that are required for any show to get greenlit, but they are held in control or at list skippable via fast forward. There is also a correctly formulated amount of luridness to hold attention if the plot can't. I've been watching it so I obviously must like it. But I've been watching it the way I might have watched...oh, I don't know, something from the 70s or the 80s, like Kojack or L.A. Law or something. It's on, I'm familiar with the characters, it's mildly entertaining, it doesn't require much thought or attention. Contrast this to something like Deadwood, or Sopranos, or The Wire, where I was riveted and then immediately rewatched it for any subtleties I'd missed.

I should caveat this with the observation that the universe of TV is huge and global and I am not aware of everything, so there may be gems out there. For the most part, I feel safe saying that the vast wasteland has returned. Or, more accurately, we have returned to it. I miss David Milch.

[Covid19, Rant] Coronatime, Month 5

All right, I'm going to lay off the doom and gloom social commentary this month. Let's do some quick hits on some interesting news and developments, none of which have to do with masks.

When this whole thing started back in March and everyone was comparing it to the 1918 flu epidemic, I pointed out it was not 1918 anymore. Not only are standards of hygiene superior, but our biotech capabilities were undreamed of back then. This virus had every molecule in it mapped and analyzed before it even became famous. There are 199 vaccines in development, a handful of which are far along. There is even one that you can do at home now if you have some level of medical knowledge. In fact, I would expect that the only thing that prevents us from having a vaccine by year end is incompetent bureaucracy. Given our revealed inability to intelligently assess risk and return and to find the compromises with rules and regulations that are required in extreme circumstances, I wouldn't put it past our regulators and politicians to screw this up.

But there I go getting dark and snide again. I will stop. The point is that it is amazing what our capabilities are and entirely possible that when all is said and done and we look back on this from five years hence, it will be a source of pride. I found this recap of the vaccine research process encouraging.

Also under the heading of tooting my own horn, while the rest of the world was obsessed with the idea that how well you adhered to the prescribed methods -- social distancing, masks, sheltering, etc. -- was explaining all the variation in infection rates, I maintained there was something else, something we hadn't discovered yet. A couple of things have since come to light.

The thing that gave me, and many others, pause was that almost all the cause and effect theories that people had in their heads and were making policy based on, fell apart because there was always data that confounded them -- all suppositions had counterexamples that suggested there was too much margin for error. Eggheads call that heterogeneity of results. Now, humans being human, since we could determine what was going on with certainty, we just made up stories that coincide with our existing prejudices, filtered the data we acknowledged to fit our made-up stories, and got on with our standard hostilities.

There are a couple of important bits of information in this Marginal Revolution post.

First, there have been two major strains of the virus, one significantly more contagious than the other. Which strain is prevalent in a certain area has a huge effect on the rate of infection. South Korea, which was applauded for such a successful response, had almost entirely the less contagious strain. New York had almost entirely the most contagious strain. Perhaps public policy and adherence to it wasn't the crucial element after all.

Second, there is evidence that there is a genetic component to how susceptible you are to infection and the viral load you can carry. And as any genetic component will do, it broadly follows ethnic and racial lines, which makes it nearly taboo to speak of.

This Washington Post story finds other interesting things. Namely that Covid does not appear to progress through the population in a general steady manner like, say, measles. What we now call Superspreaders and Superspreader Events play a large role. They also walk right up to, but do not outright declare, that there may be a genetic component to being a superspreader.

Scientists suspect these "super-emitters" may have much higher levels of the virus in their bodies (viral load) than others, or may release them by talking, shouting or singing in a different way from most people. Research based on the flu, which involved college students blowing into a tube, showed that a small percentage tended to emit smaller particles known as aerosols more than others. These particles tend to hang or float, and move with the flow of air -- and therefore can go much farther and last longer than larger droplets.

Furthermore they note that a key to accelerator to superspreading is HVAC. To me that implies the best bang for the buck might be investment in air filtration systems. Essentially putting a mask on your air vents.

And here is a wonderfully clear and informative article about how the immune system works. Can you work all the information in this article into your own thinking? Does it leave you still believing the other side in the culture war is the cause of all the problems? If so, I don't think objective communication is possible for you.

The point I am trying to make is that if some small percent of the people refuse to wear masks as some sort of silly protest, it may not be making a big difference; it might not be the cause of any of the variations we are seeing in infection rates. Maybe we could dial back the hostilities in this area.

In any event, there were only two ways this was ever going to end. One was to fight it off as best we can until a vaccine is found. The other was to just protect yourself as best you can and wait until it infects through enough people to burn itself out (herd immunity). It looks like we are going for the first alternative. I have high hopes that we can finish the job by the end of the year, although that may be giving our bureaucracy too much credit.

[Tech, Rant] Defending Facebook

I'm going to take a brief moment to say something nice about Facebook. Stand back.

Actually two nice things. First, Zuckerberg has done an admirable job of staying neutral in the culture wars. I know there are cadres on either side of the fence that think staying neutral makes you the enemy. I'm sure they both leverage Facebook's neutrality to forward that belief.

The second thing occurred to me while reading this very insightful Scholar's Stage essay about the lost world of internet forums and why Twitter is so awful. I would argue the Facebook Groups are the new internet forums. Like the old forums access is controlled. Only people involved in the special interest get themselves into the associated group, so there is no broad-based piling-on by the wider web. Group admins can be as ruthless as they want, because they can't kick people off Facebook, only out of their group. If folks think they have been treated unfairly, they can just start their own damn group, but their access to Facebook is unchanged. (This happens usually when you get a group member who won't shut up about politics.)

I've become a real fan of Facebook Groups and belong to a number of them. I highly encourage it to keep your online life marginally sane.

While I'm thinking of it, let me add a third good thing about Facebook: the ad model. The banner ads down the right side of the webpage don't count; they are easily ignored and I don't think you get them on mobile. I mean the ones they pop into your news feed. They do an excellent job of matching them with your needs and interests. I know a lot of people freak out about how this is an invasion of privacy. I think those fears are overwrought, but that's a topic for another post. Since I get Facebook for free, like TV, I expect commercials, but at least I get commercials of the sort I am interested in. And if I don't like something, blocking it going forward is about a 10 second operation. I actually get ads in my feed I want and frequently click on, which is something I never would have predicted 10 years ago.

And now, with all the controversy about TikTok being spyware, they just released a competing product, which was a truly sharp move. Facebook is for old folks now, but they could snag the young audience if it becomes a default replacement if TikTok is banned.

The Month That Was - June 2020

I don't know if you really want to read anything I wrote this month. It's just rants, at points nearly incoherent. This month has been especially trying in not letting the world get the best of me. I hope it is a low point and things swing up from here. My only hope is to continue to count my blessings, which I must remember are quite numerous. I hope next month to be in a more positive state of mind.

[Movies, TV, Music, Good Links] Entertainment Consumables
[Rant] The Late Slate Star Codex
[Rant] Coronatime, Month 4

[Movies, TV, Music, Good Links] Entertainment Consumables

Quick hits on sound and vision.

• Knives Out is weird. A solid drawing room style murder mystery, it made some waves because people assigned it socio-political meaning. I suppose there was possibly that intent, I don't know. I do know it was a very impressively-plotted mystery, speaking as someone who understands how difficult that is. What I think ultimately holds it back is the casting. There were a lot of high-end names associated with this, none of whom were particularly believable in their roles -- especially Daniel Craig. They do their level best but none transcend their miscasting. Not a bad bit of entertainment, but ultimately little more than a curiosity.
• Midway -- There have been two movies about the battle of Midway, one in 1976 and one in 2019. Both have been less than mediocre. This latest one has little to no character development, the pilots were so undifferentiated I couldn't remember why I was supposed to care about whom. Lip service to the wives back home was empty. Even the action scenes were unaffecting. It was mostly vanilla dramatizations of commonly known events. Skip this one. It's a shame. The Battle of Midway deserves a more Band of Brothers-y treatment.
• Theme Time Radio Hour -- Radio show, or perhaps a podcast(?), hosted by Bob Dylan as a sort of old school DJ. I've been working my way through the episodes. Dylan reaches way back, often as far back as the '30s, to find songs to match the theme. It's a good antidote to standard broadcasting or machine formed playlists.
• Sleep With Me, I may have mentioned this podcast before, but I've recently gone back to it to help me chill. Essentially it is a guy droning on, telling rambling stories, or absent-mindedly recapping TV episodes in a meandering, monotonous kind of way. If you are trying to follow the narrative, you are doing it wrong. It is amiable and aimless with the intent that it lingers at the edge of your conscious mind and eases you into sleep. It absolutely works for me.
• Perry Mason - the latest series from HBO. Old folks will remember Perry Mason as a TV lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the '50s and '60s. Here we go back to his origin as a skid row private eye in the '30s. The effect is a bit strained, as if everything was laboring to send a message or to make an important point. I also don't know if I buy Matthew Rhys as the lead. It's full of darkly motivated characters, as noirish as it gets, but feels a little too inorganic. Still, we're only three episodes in. If it pans out I may comment more.
• Wendover Productions -- Not strictly "entertainment", this is a YouTube channel that cranks out 15 minute videos explaining how some key and complex aspects of commerce work. How Airports make (or lose) money. How long-haul trucking works. The thing here is that these are short and to the point, versus, say, a Discovery Channel show that has to fill in 30-60 minutes. Nothing revelatory, just keenly interesting to those with active and inquisitive minds.

[Rant] The Late Slate Star Codex

I'd provide a link here to one of the finest websites ever, Slate Star Codex, but the author took it down in anticipation of having his real name published in the New York Times. A bit of explanation is in order.

Slate Star Codex is the blog of Scott Alexander (a pseudonym), a practicing psychiatrist and amatuer philosopher (I guess you'd call it). He wrote with great clarity, not just in his field of psychiatry but in book reviews and general commentary and was even skilled at fiction. He would deep dive into commonly held beliefs, by which I mean he would pull apart the research behind them, often discovering very tenuous bases in fact. He would dig into commentary until he finally reached the assumptions at the firmament. Honestly, if for some reason I chose to try to make this blog into something of enduring value, I would want to be just like his.

Needless to say, his blog became quite popular and influential in certain circles. This drew the attention of the New York Times who wanted to profile it. In the course of their research they discovered Scott Alexander's real name and intended to publish it as part of the article.

Now. Scott has any number of political beliefs, although it would be hard to pigeon-hole him as right or left. Also, whenever discussing them, which is a rarity, he always gives the impression that he knows they are beliefs and not undebatable truths. And he always gives the impression that, were someone to demonstrate an error in his thinking, he would change his thinking. (Imagine that!) All that is to say that no reasonable person would take gross moral umbrage with Scott's beliefs. We are not, however, reasonable people.

First, as a psychiatrist, it's incredibly important that he is able to maintain personal distance from his clients. Exposure would potentially destroy that. Second, and he doesn't outright state this, but I suspect there is a strong possibility of him losing professional contacts or being outright cancelled if it turns out he had come to an unfashionable conclusion on a topic that angered the wrong people. So he removed the site. Here it is from the horse's mouth.

Absolutely no good comes of this. I work very hard to try to understand the motivations of both, or all, sides in controversy or conflict, but I see no cogent motivation for the NYT to do this. They are claiming it's a matter of journalistic ethics, but that holds no water. No harm would come from withholding Scott's real name (and the NYT has a long history of being flexible on journalistic standards).

I suppose the good news is that it's not going unresisted. There is a great deal of displeasure being expressed across the web and some within the NYT. As respected as Scott is, I do hope there will be consequences for the NYT. Were I important enough, I would, at a minimum, refuse them access and quotes. I would also no longer link to their website. (Yes, I can and will do that but it's meaningless in my case.) The article hasn't been published yet so maybe NYT will back off.

I have for years been in the camp of claiming the world is, on average, getting better, however slowly and haphazardly it may be happening. As little degradations like this build over time, it's harder and harder for me to maintain that optimism.

[Covid19, Rant] Coronatime, Month 4

At this point it's mostly about the masks. Your identity is defined by how you feel about masks. Are you careful to wear one everywhere and call out those who don't? Do you not wear one unless told to? Are you a slave to our cultural elites or a nazi? Those are your two choices.

Two sentences: (1)There are not really any replicable and peer-reviewed studies that show masks do any good and note that, early on, we were told they were useless. (2) There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that they do work, and frankly it scores high on the common sense test. Which of those carries more weight with you depends on whether you are a slave to cultural elites or a nazi.

I don't know which is right so I have to do some risk evaluation. I default to wearing the mask indoors unless there is a good reason not to and I am pretty solidly distanced from others. I don't wear the mask in my gym, but it's less a gym than a personal training studio where clients are kept strictly away from each other, the trainers all wear masks, and the equipment is cleaned psychotically, and I need to breathe freely to work out. I didn't wear the mask the handful of times I dined out once I was seated, but on the way to and from the table I did. That's about it. Why do I do this? Not because I think I'd be a nazi if I didn't. It's just risk/reward evaluation.

If wearing the mask saves lives then I'll be glad I wore it. If it doesn't, well, I have been inconvenienced for no good reason. Seems like a good trade to make. Also, I try to be polite. If a place of business requests I wear a mask I do, for the same reason I wear pants. Nevertheless, if you are wandering around without a mask, I don't think that makes you a nazi. You just have a different risk profile than I have. If you are wandering around without pants I might take issue.

More worrisome to me is that political leaders have completely undermined their moral authority to put the brakes on any reopening by supporting massive public protests and rallies. I have the feeling they can make all the decrees they want, be it about masks or anything else but nobody is going to follow them and any attempt at enforcement by the demoralized police forces will be futile. However you feel about the protests, the fact is our leaders made an implied statement that if you really feel strongly about something, you don't need to follow our restrictions.

Here in Michigan, the governor lost (then won) another case. An association of gym owners sued to have the executive order keeping them closed lifted. They won. There is a lot of misrepresentation of what this actually meant, but essentially it is along the same lines as the suit brought by the Rebel Barber of Owosso, which I discussed last month. The courts were not allowing the closing of specific classes of businesses without evidence that the act of the business itself is especially risky. Something to keep in mind here: the courts were not saying gyms are safe, they were saying if you want to treat gyms separately from other businesses you have to show evidence that the acts of business that gyms are involved in are risky -- i.e. lifting weights, running on a treadmill, etc. This is roughly the same thing that happened with the Rebel Barber of Owosso. Also, this didn't mean gyms can open and run as before, it means they can open if they can find ways to adhere to the governor's broader safety guidelines. Essentially, the courts -- both a fed court in the gym case and a State court in the barber case -- seemed to be saying you can't single out certain businesses for different policies without evidence. Anyone who can adhere to safety guidelines should be allowed to open. Then, of course, the Governor won a last minute appeal, and so one day before opening, gyms found out they had to stay closed.

I have been saying that openings or closings should be targeted based on ability to implement safety protocols not by type of business for months just as a matter of good policy, so obviously I'm on board with the original court decision. Before anyone gets their jimmies rustled over this, I freely acknowledge that my opinion means nothing and my words will not convince anyone of anything. Yours too.

A couple of months ago I suggested that we are now a nation of people eagerly hoping that we can be the ones to say "I told you so" 6 months from now. You can see this gearing up with the reaction to re-openings and potential second waves. There are four possibilities:

State reopens fast / no second wave
State reopens fast / second wave occurs
State reopens slow / no second wave
State reopens slow / second wave occurs

I can pretty much guarantee every one of these will happen somewhere. Just point to the States or regions that justify your position and recite the appropriate: "I told you so":

State reopens fast / no second wave: I told you the restrictions did no good
State reopens fast / second wave occurs: I told you it was reckless to lift restrictions
State reopens slow / no second wave: I told you the restrictions worked
State reopens slow / second wave occurs: I told you the restrictions didn't matter

Of course, you know you are under no obligation to word it so reasonably. And feel free to add the appropriate insult to the group you are targeting.

As far as what we can believe, well, who knows? We've seen charts indicating infections are soaring with no sort of acknowledgement, except the finest of print, that it may be due to (hushed whisper) the mass protests since it seems the increase in cases may be mostly among the young. Conversely, the death rate dropping is another indicator that the most vulnerable are keeping safe. None of this is proven or disproven so you get to make it mean you've been right all along. If you're a nazi this just shows how wrong it was to quarantine the masses; if you're a slave to the cultural elites it shows how the nazis have made things worse by not wearing masks. The CDC now thinks that for every known infection there are as many as 10 unrecorded infections. Does that confirm or contradict your feelings? The answer to that will tell you whether the CDC is speaking the truth.

Here is a complicated article on something called T-cell immunity, which suggests we are not yet clear on how resistant people already are to COVID19. Here is an even more complicated Twitter thread on new things we have just begun to model about herd immunity. Here is another complex Twitter thread explaining that while the number of known infections have eye-poppingly soared, the number of deaths has been decreasing on both a relative and absolute basis, even considering the time lag between reports and deaths. Can you incorporate these into your feelings? Can you even understand what they imply? I'm not sure I can, but maybe you're smarter than me.

As far as I can tell, Tyler Cowen may be the only one besides me who is overwhelmed by how inconsistent and random outbreaks and infection rates seem to be. The reaction when you point this out is for someone to propose a possible cause of some dichotomy, usually a solution in which that someone was right along. This misses the point. There are so many different dichotomies, anomalies, and outright contradictions that it seems like there is something we are missing, something important.

The fact remains we simply do not know enough yet to draw anything but the broadest conclusions. In this atmosphere, we need to just do the best we can, which we are probably doing in our own haphazard, inefficient, and outright hostile way. Given the FACT of our uncertainty you would think folks would be somewhat understanding of people on the other side of an argument. You would think wrongly.

I once heard suggested that whenever someone expresses an opinion they should be required to put a percentage on it as to their certainty. Good idea, but it would be futile. Everyone would just put 100% and accuse anyone who disagreed of ignorance and stupidity.

Yeah, I'm a little down on humanity these days.

The Month that Was - May 2020

Well, as promised, I got the hell out of Dodge. I took a few days down in Houston as Texas was well ahead of Michigan in easing restrictions. I ate out. Got my hair cut. Spent toasty days by the pool. It was heaven-adjacent. Next I need to get down to Florida to see my brother.

What I really need to do, above all else, is stop procrastinating on my fiction writing. You would think this situation was the perfect excuse to really kick in the afterburners on my book, but instead I have been using it as an excuse to watch more dumb movies and peruse more social media. This must stop above all else.

[TV, Sports] Tube Notes, Lonely at the Top
[Movies] Flick Check, A Couple to Skip
[Rant] Coronatime, Month 3

[TV, Sports] Toob Notes, Lonely a the Top

Two documentaries featuring the best ever athletes at their sport came out on ESPN.

Last Dance
The story of the rise of Michael Jordan and the stormy times with the six-time NBA champion Chicago Bulls. It was too long and with too much filler. It was also way too worshipful, but that's not surprising since it's motivator is Bill Simmons who is the author of the terrific Book of Basketball and almost certainly the biggest basketball fan in history.

There was a time when I was a basketball fan. I loved the NBA in the Bird/Magic era. I would often watch entire double-headers and I still hear the NBA on CBS jingle when I think of it. Of course, I followed the Pistons back-to-back championship teams who everyone else hated, and rightly so. They were truly thugs on the court, but they were our thugs. (That's lame at best and shameful at worst.)

Michael Jordan never interested me. I hated the fawning he got, no matter how much he deserved it. I hated the media saturation. Coming from this era of great competition between Magic and Bird followed by the home team championships we go into the era where it not only was just about one team, but about one person that caused me to sour on the NBA.

In any event, I learned a couple of things from this documentary. First, I never knew how much conflict there was on those Bulls teams, not just with Bulls management but also among the players themselves. The other thing I noticed was Michael Jordan's intelligence. He had much more shaded views of events than I would have imagined. He seems very self-aware and thoughtful about his actions during those times. The extent to which he is regretful about anything is never explored although it can be read between the lines in some cases. Still, there is no mention of gambling or the less laudable second comeback.

At ten hour-long episodes it would have benefitted from some more judicious editing. It could have been at least 30% shorter.

Lance
The Lance Armstrong documentary is more economical, covering two two-hour episodes. Now that all the lawsuits have been settled; Lance comes clean about his actions and feelings. It is anything but worshipful, and quite stark on that matter. At the outset the interviewer asks Lance if he is going to tell the truth, and Lance responds that he will tell "my truth". Well, then.

We all know the outlines of Lance's story. Highlighted here are many scenes from his youth, his pre-cancer youth. He was a real prick. Think of the kind of prickishness that many young people display and amplify it by his level of talent and there you go. I always knew he was a prick, I just didn't know how bad.

But the real meat here is following him deeper and deeper into his lie. More and more people have to be destroyed. In retrospect Lance regrets most of the harm he's caused. Most. There are some people he still feels are worthy of his wrath -- Floyd Landis in particular. He still feels victimized by inequities in how juiced cyclists are treated -- some are still loved, others trashed. And, of course, whatever his cycling legacy, there is no denying the good Livestrong foundation has done.

All said and done, these two documentaries (Lance being far superior) really haven't changed the way I think about their subjects. I disliked the fawning of Jordan when he was playing and I can't see anything in the fawning Last Dance to change my mind. I saw Lance Armstrong's downfall as a Greek tragedy of hubris and I see it even more so after Lance.

A more interesting question to me is, is it a good thing to be the best? It might seem that way, but as I look at these two documentaries, I see some terrible aspects to it. Jordan does a good job of keeping his family out of it so it's hard to tell about his relationships with them (I know his marriages have been stormy, but that's not unusual). With respect to his friends, you see people like Ahmad Rashard and a couple of others but what are those friendships actually like? What does it mean for them to be a friend Michael Jordan? Given the realities of the situation, the nature of the differences in their lives, are they really friends or orbiters. Another way of putting it is given Michael's stature and position in the world, is it possible to just be a friend of his or are there other constraints and requirements? Can you really see yourself as having an equitable relationship with Michael? I cannot say whether a "friendship" with Michael is rewarding in the way most friendships are. Nor can I speculate on whether being his son or daughter allows for the traditional family rewards. It may be better or worse, but I strongly suspect it's quite different.

I can pretty much guarantee that were costs to being Lance Armstrong's son. He tells the story of defending his father during his 'tween years -- and if you know 'tween boys, you know how brutal that would be -- only to have his father come out and admit the lies. Unlike the speculation with Jordan, Lance, and Lance, is upfront about the costs to the people around him. Even absent the "disgrace", it's clear the Lance's relationships are affected by his Lance-ness. One of the final quotes from a long time acquaintance is that he has been Lance's friend for decades and "I still don't know if I love him or hate him."

Michael is rich, of course. Lance was, but is less so now and doesn't seem to have strong prospects. Both experienced boundless glory. One is still famous, the other infamous. But what of the value of their lives.

Let's think 50-60 years out. They will be mostly forgotten as people, just the statistics and outlines of their stories will be left and known only to those who take an esoteric interest in their respective sports. As much as we elevate athletes, they are, in essence, entertainers; creators of ephemeral exhilaration. There is value in that, however fleeting. There is, of course, value in the charitable work they have both done. Michael, as Chairman of the Charlotte Hornets, keeps a large business running and makes payroll, which is an underrated source value.


At my age, I have come to the conclusion that the value of your life is in how much you've enhanced the lives of the people you care about and it would be easy to say that the added costs of your glory to those close to you are too high and swamp the benefits. But that would be to discount the value you have, or could have, provided to strangers. As I started this post I was assuming I would come to the conclusion that the personality types who have that level of competitive drive are ultimately toxic for those around them and so it would be more of a curse than anything else, but now I am not so sure. I think if you have that level of competitiveness in you and you do not have the gifts to achieve it, that might be another story. That strikes me as a recipe for sociopathology. If you do actually achieve that level of eliteness, it seems like the pluses you can offer to the world might -- might -- outweigh the struggles of those around you (and yourself).

Back to the documentaries, take Last Dance with a grain of salt. Lance is an all time great character study. Both are worth watching.

Addendum: Some have outright accused the Last Dance of being rife with lies. Maybe an entire shaker of salt is in order.