The Month That Was - January 2021

I have no actual New Year's resolutions.  If there are goals that need to be set, I hope I wouldn't wait for a specific date to set them.  Just start right away.  I do have what I refer to as New Year's resolutions, but they are really just life guidelines. 

1. Enhance the lives of the people I care about whenever possible.

2. Fight sloth (the Deadly Sin, not the adorable forest creature)

I have had the same ones for years and I see no reason to change. I continue to do pretty well on the first one, I think.  Less so on #2.

One thing that does have to change is that I wrote virtually zero fiction last year.  I found out how deeply entwined my writing was with my daily habits. It is entirely psychological.  Nothing stops me from grabbing my notebook and sitting down and writing, but I had a certain place and certain times when I did that, and I was unable to get beyond the disruption of losing that thanks to the lockdowns.  I am ashamed of this.  I see it as a severe weakness.  When I think about it I despair of ever finishing my current project which makes me dodge it even more.  I must break this cycle.

Per current forecasts, we are facing an especially cold, and probably snowy, February. Joy. I need to head south.

[Covid19, Rant] Coronatime, Month 11

[Rant] You Are Getting Sleepy

[TV]Toob Notes

[Rant, Covid19] Coronatime, Month 11

We'll start out with this assessment of herd immunity, suggesting that the end might actually be in sight. That's not from some agenda-driven crank, the guy behind it is legit.  The upshot is the expectation is that herd immunity will likely be achieved by July/August.  There are, of course, wild cards: his herd immunity target of 75% may be low, and there are new strains of the virus which may react differently to vaccines and such, but I'm comfortable with this as my working expectation.

More concerning to me is the abysmal process of getting vaccines and treatments approved and distributed. From the get-go our inability to alter our rigid thinking or resist our entrenched bureaucracy has cost way more lives than any lockdowns have saved.  Compared to the finger-pointing and righteous screeching about masks that I have seen all over social media, there seems to be little concern about this among everyday people. Now I shall get oblique.

I am fond of saying the world has gotten better in my lifetime and likely continues to do so, but it is a painful, chaotic process of ten steps forward and nine steps back.  Also, it's non-linear, non-sequential.  There is no one series of steps of which on average 10 are forward and 9 are back.  There are steps happening all the time, everywhere, often unseen.  This means the progress is happening in a world of constant upheaval.  Furthermore, if your mental time frame or event set happens to contain more steps back than steps forward, you can easily fall into the belief that the world is degrading. Once you have adopted a belief, as we all know, our cognitive biases burst into action to prevent it from changing at all costs.

Over the course of my lifetime, and probably starting well before, the world has gotten safer.  I'm not speaking of crime, but speaking of overall safety -- accident prevention, health concerns, etc. We have built up a huge set of guidelines and processes, often with the force of law, to do this. This includes consumer goods having an enormous number of safety tests to pass; drugs have gotten special scrutiny and control.  Behavioral guidelines have been installed and are increasingly enforced by technological innovation--the primary focus here being auto traffic. And when there isn't an institution to enforce a specific rule, liability and tort law has bent all our activities to be biased toward caution.  These things can spiral into absurdity and accusations of nanny-statism and fear-mongering follow on, often well-founded, but on balance, I am going to say this is a step forward.  As a rule of thumb, not being in peril is better than being in peril, especially mortal peril.

But then there's the step back.  When a situation came along and the very institutions and laws that we built to protect started working against us, we didn't know what to do.  Put it this way, can you imagine someone in 1918, with the flu epidemic raging, being told that there are great treatments and vaccines available that seem to work really well and that other countries have implemented them with good results, but we are going to have to wait months (or years) to try them because we can't change the rules, and even if they were available we still have to make sure that certain groups of people get them in a certain order, even if that means throwing some away?  1918-guy may have been a barbarian who kicked his children out the door in the morning to fend for themselves until dinner time, but I doubt he would have stood for that.  In fact, it would be so unimaginable to his time and place that it never would have happened to begin with.

We've gained a safer, more secure, less traumatic day-to-day life through lots of adaptation and innovation and struggle over the past decades, but this is what we've lost.  We are facing a horrible situation that 1918-guy couldn't even conceive of, and we just shrug at the blank-faced bureaucracy that's empowering it.  Thousands continue to die, while we are content to pat ourselves on the back for shaming a small percentage of people not wearing masks. 

This is one of those data sets where the steps back outweigh the steps forward.  Be careful of the beliefs it spawns.    

Important Note: I am in the Phase III trial for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.  I have received my vaccination, which is 66.67% likely to be a vaccine and 33.33% likely to be a placebo.  This vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, the EU, and India.  There is a factory in Baltimore that is cranked up and ready to produce this vaccine at a prodigious rate.  Yet as near as I can tell we are still weeks away from approval here. With millions of people getting the vaccine across the world, it's a pretty safe bet that nothing terrible is going to happen.  This is the perfect example of what I am talking about above. We cannot seem to set aside our dedication to bureaucratic processes even though people are dying by the thousands every day.

[Rant] You Are Getting Sleepy

I am not sleeping well.  This has happened periodically throughout my life, but with increasing frequency.  It usually takes the form of falling asleep at a reasonable hour, waking anywhere between 1:00 to 3:00AM, then being unable to return to sleep until shortly before my alarm is about to go off.  The end result is I am trying to get by on 2 or 3 hours of fitful sleep per night.  

I am fervently resisting any chemical assistance since I fear it will impede whatever natural adaptations my body or mind might make otherwise (this may be erroneous thinking on my part). The thing is, when you reach a certain age, you begin to experience what are irreversible degradations anyway.  The worry about impeding your body from adapting becomes less of a concern because in many cases, your body has given up adapting.  Ingesting various chemicals becomes a question of extending a good quality of life for as long as you can. 

But I'm not there with respect to sleep yet.  My current thinking is that while nothing particularly urgent is bothering me, there are big questions lingering in my near future as I barrel towards retirement and senior citizenship and, with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company in bed, these are agitating my mind, mostly subconsciously.  At whatever point in the next few years I find those questions resolved, if I still have trouble sleeping then it's pills for me until the end of the line.  For now, I'll only take the softest of sleep aids and only in the direst of circumstances.

The related topic I wanted to touch on is my dreams.  I cannot tell you a single dream I have had in my life.  Not one.  Literally every dream I have ever had has vanished from my memory.  Oh, I remember that I had a dream; I sometimes remember a detail or two for a few seconds after I wake up but then any images simply vaporize. It's a very strange experience, but as far as I know it has had no deleterious effect on me.

Of late however, there has been a change.  I still can't recall any images or details of my dreams, but I can recall a theme.  This is even stranger.  So while any details still vaporize I'm left with an impression of the big picture plot. And, though the setting changes, that plot always involves me needing to complete some task or activity and never being able to. Maybe I'm trying to drive somewhere where someone is waiting and I keep running into traffic or have an engine failure -- every issue gets resolved and then another pops up with the result being I wake up with the task undone.

It is just the oddest thing.  I cannot recall any images or details, but I know the plot and theme.  I know it starts out with an innocuous task to complete and spirals into chaos and frustration, the tasks never being completed.  But I can't recall the specific tasks, the specific interruptions, or any people, places, or things.  It's like a weird form of mental illness.  There are people who can't remember faces -- they know who the people in their lives are, they see them every day, know their personal history with them, but for some bizarre reason of mental wiring, they can never recall their faces.  In a small way, I now know what that feels like.  I know what happens in my dreams, but I can't hold on to an image of it.

All this is apropos of nothing in particular and it's unlike me to share this sort of thing. I suppose if I ever find myself completely going off the rails into madness, this might be a clue to where it started.

[TV] Toob Notes

Chernobyl -- The cautionary tale of all cautionary tales.  A harrowing example of what happens when truth is subjugated to delusion in the extreme.  The first 2 episodes are absolutely riveting, even maddening.  It drifts into misery porn a bit in the later episodes (there are five total) in an effort to make a point that has already been made, but it is otherwise quite well done.  What's worse is that by most accounts it is extremely accurate.  That's good considering that it will likely become the eventual definition of the event in public consciousness.  

It is, simply put, the story of how delusion in the service of power and arrogance killed tens of thousands of people (although officially still only 31) and destroyed countless lives.  But it is also the story of how scores of men volunteered for suicide missions to prevent it.  In the Orwellian horror show that was the Soviet Union, where any hopes and dreams were thwarted outright, where depression and despair underlay everything, people still valued each other's lives enough to sacrifice like that.  

Excellent show.  Not something to cheer you up.

Aside:  In the interest of everything being a nail and Chernobyl the hammer, you have to wonder about what happened in Wuhan.

Tiger -- Every documentary has to follow a narrative.  (Perhaps the best ones track more than one possible narrative and let the viewer resolve the ambiguity themselves.)  The narrative of Tiger, the story of Tiger Woods, turns Tiger into Citizen Kane, and makes a compelling case.

We start with Tiger as a youth.  Yes, he is being groomed and monitored and controlled as we all know, but he also still has some attachment to normalcy.  He has a bunch of standard high school friends and they have silly and goofy times.  He even has a high school sweetheart.  He appears to be a proverbial "nice kid": friendly, a bit introverted, a bit innocent.  Then adulthood hits and any aspects of himself are crushed.  He is set up, not just by his father, but by the expectations of popular culture, as a figure of enormous responsibility.  A savior-lite, if you will.  One who, through his talent and popularity, will be a uniting force for all mankind.  That is not hyperbole.  That is how his father publicly described him and how Nike promoted him. Of course, we all know how it came crashing down.  But Tiger goes deeper into the psychological cause and effect, and does it very well.

Tiger's lack of self combined with the shadow of his father leads to trouble.  He takes to spending time training with Navy Seals -- his father was a green beret -- and fantasizes about joining them.  He also starts womanizing -- his father was an inveterate womanizer -- which leads to his ultimate crash.  All the while, injuries are keeping him in a fairly constant state of pain, which he must deny to meet expectations.  The death of his father rattles him.  Interestingly, it could have been a new beginning for him, but it just tightened his spiral.

We all now know the stories of the scores of women he had extra-marital relationships with, but in what is probably the key reveal of this documentary is that these were not quickies with club tramps or lurid trysts with Onlyfans whores. These were typically normal work-a-day women -- a diner waitress, an administrative assistant -- and a number of them declare their ongoing love for him to this day.  They report his vulnerability and desperation.  They were complicit in his subterfuge out of sympathy. It's really quite remarkable and unlike similar public scandals.  And it cements the image of Tiger as a tragic figure.  (It's also an interesting angle on the psychology of a certain aspect of womanhood and I do not mean that in a condescending or negative way.)

In the final sequence, as Tiger is pulled over by the Florida State troopers, intoxicated and completely disoriented.  They ask where he was coming from.   He says Orange County.  Sad that he didn't even realize what state he was in, but then we cut back to his high school sweetheart in Orange County and we replay a video of what were probably some of the last carefree moments in his life.  All we needed at this point was a voice-over of "Rosebud".

Exceptionally well done.  It's hard not to wish the best for Tiger.

Wandavision

I'll probably have more to say about this once the season concludes, but nicely done (so far) and very cool that Marvel is willing to take chances like this; doing something very much out of the ordinary.  It could have been Law and Order with superheroes -- which is probably what it would have been had network TV gotten involved or if it was made by Sony.  A lot of fun, but I would suggest waiting until the series is complete then binge the entire thing.  A half hour at a time has been frustrating.

The Month That Was - December 2020

Everyone seems quite happy to see 2020 go.  It certainly has sucked but I'm not going to pile on.  In fact, below you can read what will likely be the most positive take on the virus you could plausibly imagine.

Apart from the Covid update, just video consumables this week.  As far as bidding adieu to 2020, I think Robin Hanson said it best:  

"I am grateful to have been alive in 2020. I might have rather that better things happened in 2020, but re the choice to exist or not, it isn't close. Yay for existing!"

[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 10

[Movies] The Rise (and fall, and further fall) of Skywalker

[Movies] Wonder Woman 1984

[TV] Queen's Gambit

[Covid19, Rant] Coronatime, Month 10

I'm going to take a different tack this time and ask a stupid question: What if we are not doing so bad?  I know everyone is screaming and pointing about how horrible and uncaring everyone else is.  And I know there have been a lot of -- how shall we say it? -- sub-optimal decisions and actions.  But let's draw a big picture comparison.  

Hindsight grips us and tells us we should have done things better or faster, we should have been more stringent or more thoughtful. There will be lessons from this.  I hope we learn them. Personally, the lesson I see is that we need a better way of doing risk assessment when our standard environment of safety breaks down. But that is just what it is: hindsight.

In the 1918-20 .675% of the U.S. population was killed by the Spanish flu.  Rounding up, that's 7 people out of every thousand.  So far .129% of the U.S. population has been killed. Rounding up because it's not over yet, let's call that one-and-a-half people out of every thousand.  Put another way, at Spanish Flu mortality levels we would be looking at over 2 million dead instead of what is likely to be less than 400 thousand -- 1.6 million lives.  You can consider that a benefit bestowed by science and technology -- better health care, better hygiene, better communication, greatly enhanced scientific capability.

I am loath to even dip a toe in politics, but to the various factions that are trying to rip asunder our world social and economic order in the name of justice and/or freedom: you better be damned well certain your new world could do the same or better.  

I have become strangely optimistic about things.  Lost in the shuffle have been tremendous achievements that are going to pay off for years to come.  Bio-medical stuff like solving protein folding and more targeted cancer treatments.  New battery and microchip technology.  New nuclear power plant design approvals.  Peter Theil believes Covid is going to mark a new era.  I have mentioned before that I would not be surprised if all this leads to a second Roaring Twenties.  Given the pessimistic nature of our culture at this moment, I hope we don't use any newfound blessings as a reason to hate ourselves more.  That aside, I am indeed optimistic.  I almost wish I was young again so I could fully experience looking at such a bright future. Almost.

One last thing -- and this is very important: For most people, if you get a positive Covid test the thing to do is just ride it out.  If you know you are "high-risk" or start to get serious symptoms to the point where you are considering treatment, read this: Current Covid Treatment Advice.  It will step you through what to ask for from your doctors. 

But everyone should read that article all the way through.  If there is anything to be angry about in all this it is not the little political policy and behavioral differences that everyone screams about. It is the fact that our bureaucratic regulatory environment could not adapt to an extreme event.  

"If everyone in the world took just the fluvoxamine for 14 days after they learned they were COVID positive, our hospitals and ICUs would be nearly empty today. If everyone took doxazosin or metformin, we could cut the hospitalization rate in half. The problem is that double-blind outpatient RCTs take too much time to execute during a pandemic and doctors are trained only to accept RCT trial data and to ignore anything else. This has caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and death. The fluvoxamine trial results were made public on October 6, but the mainstream media ignored it since it was a small trial (N=152)."

The Pfizer vaccine was created in a weekend. A life-saving treatment has been available for 3 months.  But people continue to die and businesses fail and lives ruined, all because we can't seem to see beyond our overhead.  If you want to get mad about something, get mad about that.

[Movies] Flick Check: The Rise (and fall, and further fall) of Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was bad.  I know that won't surprise you because everyone has seen it and read the reviews.  Let's consider all nine movies in order of release:

4 - Classic

5 - Arguably even more classic

6 - Pretty darn good but marred by Ewoks

1 - Godawful

2 - Crap

3 - Crap

7 - Crap adjacent

8 - Pukeworthy

9 - Crap

Given that, it's quite remarkable how this mess has remained a cultural touchstone. My first reaction was that it must be another instance of Boomers controlling the economy, but then I am a late Boomer and I was 16 when Star Wars was first released and 19 when Empire came out.  The bulk of Boomers were well into their 20s or even 30s.  You could argue that even a 30-year-old Boomer was an impressionable child, and I'm not sure I'd disagree, but I have to believe that the generation that has kept Star Wars at the forefront or pop culture because of sentimental attachment to the early films is Gen X.  Can't really blame this one on the Boomers.  

In fairness, I should point out that the stand alone movies were better -- Solo was OK and Rogue One was outright Good.  I have not seen The Mandalorian.

[Movies] Flick Check: Wonder Woman 1984

It's astonishing that Marvel has put on what is effectively a 10-year master class in action movies in general and superhero movies in particular, and Warner Brothers hasn't learned a thing.  There is simply no aspect of this movie that exceeds the mediocre.  The plot is pure formula, without the slightest twist to provide any interest.  With the exception of a single Gal Gadot scene, the acting is mailed in.  I take that back, Pedro Pascal, who played the villain, at least put in the effort to ludicrously overact.  It is too long, too repetitive, and too expository.  Even the special effects look amateurish.  Honestly, given the state of technology it seems you would have to try very hard to produce outright bad special effects, but they managed.  The cinematography is prosaic.  The dialog is juvenile and dull.  I only hope there was a PA or a Grip or someone who did something worth doing in this mess.

Strangely, it has an oddly poignant moral about accepting the truth even if it is painful, and understanding how your best desires can lead to disaster.  A good theme done disservice.

Warner made a big deal about streaming new releases on HBO Max.  HBO may regret that deal if this is the sort of thing they can expect.

[TV] Toob Notes: Queen's Gambit

So much good to say about this I don't know where to start.  Actually, I'll start by saying that it deftly sidestepped most of the pitfalls that have made TV a vast wasteland again.  Think of the premise: a young orphan girl in the sixties turns out to be a brainiac chess prodigy.  Aren't you anticipating a movie where the poor girl is crushed day after day by horrible men telling her she can't do what she wants yet she manages to succeed in spite of them, thereby teaching us all a lesson about the horrors of modern day sexism?  Well this ain't that.

Beth Harmon (the lead character) is orphaned when her mentally ill mother is killed in a car crash, or possibly suicide attempt, her illigtimate father having either disappeared or been chased away.  Here we have our first clue that this series is about humans and not ideology.  We are never really sure whether the mother was driven to madness or born that way or came to it through substance abuse.  We know the father made attempts to connect with the mother in the interest of Beth but we aren't sure if he gave up out of weak will or because it was made clear that he was entirely unwelcome.  (In a wasteland drama, he would have been the cause of the mother's mental illness and abandon them despite their pleas for help and who knows, probably laughed about it like Snidely Whiplash.)

In the orphanage, Beth is not -- repeat not -- abused.  It's not a warm and fuzzy place, but she is cared for thoroughly, and looked after probably as best as possible by the standards of the time.  Unfortunately the standards of the time also involved distributing tranquilizers each day, so she ends up with an addiction.  Still, in time, and with a little bit of creative dishonesty, she gets adopted.  More importantly, she forms a bond with the (male) janitor who not only teaches her how to play chess, but identifies her as a prodigy and makes sure she gets whatever exposure he can provide -- in this case the chess club at the local high school where she stomps everyone without breaking a sweat.

Beth's adopted parents are not ideal.  The woman has a fragile and precarious disposition along with her own addiction problem, and the man feels stifled by his wife's needs, likely has had his fill of her, and connives to escape.  They have no children.  The man has no interest in Beth, he only went along with the adoption in the hope that it would get his wife off his back.  If there is a villain in this it is the man. Although he doesn't abandon them without contact, he leaves on an extended business trip eventually making it clear that he will not be coming back. Simultaneously, we discover that Beth's ability to win chess tourneys can bring some money and fame. Once again, though flawed and marginal, her adopted mother, Alma, supports her next step.  In fact, I would argue Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Alma, gives an Emmy worthy performance.  One of the best drawn and most well-shaded characters in TV history and she gets a tremendously touching story arc.

I'll stop with the play-by-play there to avoid spoilers, but in the end we discover that Beth has been blessed by wonderful caring people -- including the men in her life -- and that she would not be where she is without them.    

The lesson for TV producers -- which they will not get -- is that when you look beyond making virtuous, topical, socio-political statements you get to Humanity.  And Humanity is where art resides.  Queen's Gambit is really a meditation on addiction and recovery. And kindness.  How the small unseen acts of imperfect people can combine for miraculous results.  It's optimism worthy of David Milch.  That makes it rare and valuable.

Just a quick tangent:  A vblogger has posted a video appreciation of the most recently cancelled non-wasteland TV show Lodge 49, apparently in the hopes of saving it.  I don't see that happening, but you would do a lot worse than to binge the two seasons we did get.

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
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