Category: Uncategorized

Watching NBC News puff up minor issues about Facebook into a ‘story’ about how the company put profits over country. Repeated references to ‘these insiders’ as though this is revelatory. I have 2 large problems with this story, other than its sensationalism in the tabloid style. First, it’s only because a big deal has been made about Russian advertising that this has become an issue. Facebook wouldn’t know that would happen. Second, the other half is that Russian advertising was meaningless in quantity compared to the number of ads Facebook runs, and there is literally no evidence it had any effect whatsoever on anyone. So Facebook is being criticized because people ignore the 2nd reason to make the 1st reason bigger. Is there an issue with a corporation maximizing profit too much? Yeah, that’s true with many corporations. The choice NBC is making is to portray this private company as though it needs to be regulated like a common public utility. Is that sensible? Is that good for Facebook? What if Facebook can’t do well because it’s held to these standards … and people move to another company that’s not held to those standards? The sensationalism has one obvious goal: to make the story better for NBC, but I’d argue the standards applied to them should include not-sensationalizing stories by ignoring part 2 to make part 1 seem bigger. I know it’s a different media but the NYT runs ads about ‘the truth’, but of course it’s their truth, carefully edited to present the side of things they want to highlight. It’s certainly not the whole truth. No one – at least I don’t – expect adherence to courtroom standards of truth, where the threat of punishment is more immediately real, but when you say you’re the standard for news, do you mean ‘crappy news, sensationalistic news’ or, as the absurd Fox News motto has said, ‘fair and balanced’ without being fair and balanced?

Student loan crisis

An article, linked above, notes that small loans tend not to be repaid, with a loan under $3k being substantially less likely to be repaid over time than a loan of $24k. This tends to be more true of for-profit schools and black students. Why? Dispense with race and move into class: these students tend to come from $0 net worth households, households where bank accounts are relatively rare, households where budgeting this need over that and then some other need over that has occurred. Think about the last: if you must forego paying your electric bill to pay for the gas, or if you forego dental work because you need the money to pay other bills, then you’ve learned how to make the compromises necessary for your socio-economic class. A student loan fits into that world. You can compromise about repayment because you either need to make compromises like that or, at a minimum, you’ve learned how to do that because you’ve needed to learn that skill. It is a skill. Note – and this is important: the issue isn’t really the student loan default rate but whether the people defaulting received enough education to advance their lives, whether the schooling turned out to be a decent investment. Loans are just accounting entries. Some number of them are expected to perform and some not. Once loans are made, they have a value based on that kind of risk evaluation factor. If they go into default, the value drops. It keeps dropping. I’ve received many phone calls from creditors looking for a former tenant: each new creditor has bought some pool of defaulted loans in the hope of shaking loose some coin. There is no more value in the loan than scrap financial value. There is no great systemic risk in writing off student loan debt because it gets written down over time: as the loans age, they lose time value as well and they need to be re-evaluated periodically to adjust for how the risk of repayment has changed. Think of loans as living souls, and the evaluator as an actuary looking at mortality tables. One of the great changes in the white educated population over the last few decades is that one group has become divorced in class from the skills of deciding what to give up so you can get by. That’s another story though.

Listening to early Nirvana. You can hear in their sound how they wanted to make popular music which didn’t have what was to them the bad parts of popular music. That’s a valuable way to approach the problem: from the direction of popular toward what satisfies your artistic needs. The other way is from your artistic needs to what is popular and that doesn’t work as well because your artistic needs can be too extreme – in any number of ways – to be popular without you feeling you are compromising too much. It’s easier to identify the negative aspects of something than to identify what you need to carve out of yourself, simply because it’s so hard to match what you cut out to what’s popular when you’re not approaching from the perspective of what’s popular. I think this shows up in the success of many. In some ways, it’s also what Mrs. Maisel is about: she not only learns some craft but learns that she can’t be ‘herself’, meaning the actual Midge, but rather has to fit herself to a conception that’s popular and which then fits Midge. That Amy S-P does this explicitly is pretty cool: she has an actual character who lives out a stereotype totally different from her reality, and Midge learns from that how to play the popular character once she realizes she has to step into that role in a way that preserves what she does. So she becomes Mrs. Maisel. Steve Martin became that guy who said Excuse Me. Albert Einstein became the guy who wrote e = mc^2.

It’s interesting to think about this in terms of career versus the one-hit wonders. Who Let The Dogs Out? Taylor Swift. That’s meant to be a contrast: woof-woof, woof, woof-woof versus album after album of expanding genius. The big wind from Winetka that blew back out again, versus Picasso. Is it that some have in them only the lucky shot where it all comes rtogether in an instant and for an instant, while others have in them so much more? Of course it is. That’s the gnostic gospel in one sense: if you have it within you and you bring that out, then that will save you.

It’s interesting how a person becomes an emblem and an icon. It’s also interesting how people impose their views of what that means on the person, and how sure they are that this – and sometimes only this in this specific way – is what he or she would be doing today. Truth is we don’t know. Martin King lived in a time when ‘his people’ meant black Americans in a specific way: black Americans – then negro was the polite term – were citizens but were not legally allowed to live as full citizens. This was mostly true as you went south but it was also true in the north with regards to housing and employment. At this point, it’s necessary to be careful, and for that I want to refer to a skit on Saturday Night Live in which super talented Keenan Ivory Wayans comes into an ATM behind guest host Sam Rockwell and they have a conversation about Sam viewing Keenan as a threat because he’s a fairly large black guy, including a joking ‘robbery’ bit. That was OK but what made the skit was what happened next: Sam holds the door open for a bunch of black guys as Keenan freaks out because now he’s afraid he’s going to get robbed. Which happens and the skit ends with Sam in a car as you see Keenan being beaten through the glass. My point is that it’s actually very hard to know motives once you get past legal impediments like racial deed covenants and ‘literacy tests’ applied to black people and specific actions taken by elected or appointed officials to maintain segregation. An example is that as part of their series on race in the Boston area, the Globe did the typical testing of rental and job applications. The findings are always the same: white sounding names – and voices – get better results. That’s a racial result but that doesn’t get at the motive, as the skit I described shows: it could be a simple guess, rational to the individual, that this person is a bigger risk. That risk is evaluated racially and generally not too well, but then people aren’t good at evaluating much of anything particularly well. That’s my point: people do the best they can in their individual circumstances and all you need to do is look around to see it’s pretty obvious people don’t do that well in general.

[Added: I can clarify better what I mean this way: assume there are two groups, call them B and W, and these two groups approach two connections rooms, call one R and the other C. One group approaches C to R, while the other group approaches R to C. Substitute in race and class for R and C, and white for White and black for B. Assume W goes through the rooms by starting with race and ending with Class while B goes through the rooms starting with class and ending with race. Same rooms with different perspectives. Now imagine there are hundreds of W and of B and send all those through the rooms. Do this over and over in different ways, from 1 clump to 1 by 1 at regular intervals. Unless you presume, there is no feedback, then what happens with each iteration reflects something back. Now you have to presume that information has no meaning beyond the fact of its reflection, which is nonsense because reflected information illuminates both what reflected it and what it shines on. That is another way of saying everything occurs in a context. This is true all the way up to the largest possible context: when you define the largest possible context, that actually defines both the ways context fractures into pieces and the way it accretes.

Go back to W and B: refine it further, so they go through the rooms in the same way, both R to C or C to R, to the extent they share the same approach. This means some of W and B go through the same way and some not. Now it starts to get complex: can you say these pieces of W and B go through in the same phase, meaning not only in the same perspectives but in a way that minimizes the effect of ordering? It’s not possible mathematically for a couple of reasons. First, if you build toward minimization from greater complexity, the signals vary – simple Fourier analysis – meaning the process by which minimization occurs has patterns within it and these aren’t going to be the same. Second, if you are measuring a result, that result is only stable, meaning it reaches a maximum of invariance, only when meaning is lost, meaning when the interpretability disappears. This means stability requires the lack of discernability, which is an impossibility because you’re constantly testing what is discernible or not and that is not stable outside the notion that there is a line of discernability. That line may appear stable but i isn’t stable invariantly, as I just described. This gets at the root issues with variant and invariant frames.

People with the same rooms to examine may have radically different experiences. People may have radically different intents and the interpretations of them may differ radically. There’s math behind this assertion that it is very difficult to accurately guess intent when there is more than one room to go through. And there’s always more than one room to go through. Note: I said I’d clarify. I didn’t say I’d make it easier to read. I’ve been clarifying a highly simplified interaction model. I can simplify it more to show that complexity enters at the first step when you presume or just plain accept the existence of more than one thing. One way to think of that is using tree charts: imagine your family in the center and on your left are your ancestors and on the right all your descendants. Now flip sides so on your ancestors are on your right. I said family so you imagine more than 1 descendant. Even with just you in the middle, you can trace from a descendant up to an ancestor or to another ancestor and down from an ancestor to one descendant or another. As you expand the chart, you can trace paths that include or don’t include you. Now use R and C instead of ancestor and descendant. You’re complicated so parts of you start by thinking of C and part by R. Get it? People get hung up on stuff without realizing that a) there is no perfect solution and b) part of the ‘problem’ is due to simple math.]

This asks why Mordechai Anielewicz. Mordechai was a 23 year old living in Warsaw as the Germans started to murder people as part of the process by which they would kill everyone. As commander of the resistance – the ZOB or Jewish Fighting Organization – he issued The Call to Fight. There is a kibbutz in Israel named for him called Yad Mordechai. He died fighting. From that letter: ‘It is no great art to live when life is given to you willingly! But there is an art to life just when they are trying to rob you of this life.’ That speaks to Martin King: negro Americans were being robbed of the rights of citizens, robbed of the life that white Americans generally had as citizens. Martin recognized – along with Ralph Abernathy and many others – that the best way to achieve the basic rights of American citizens was to show white Americans – at least those with open minds – that negro Americans wanted these rights and they demanded them as citizens. That is not rebellion but protest, not violence but non-violence, because only through non-violence do you demonstrate exactly what you want, which then was to be treated equally by the governments of this country as citizens of this country. Mordechai had no such option. He wrote: ‘Today we must understand that the Nazi murderers have let us live only because they want to make use of our capacity to work to our last drop of blood and sweat, to our last breath. We are slaves. And when the slaves are no longer profitable, they are killed.’ Sometimes you have to fight even though you’re going to die. Because at least you died fighting.

[Added: one of the most amazing things about the Warsaw battle was that Jews argued amongst themselves if ‘this’ was going to pass, if this was just a trial to see how much they could put up with and that eventually their tormentors would wise up, maybe recognize that Jews are valuable, or maybe the idiots would fail miserably and someone else would come in who would restore humanity. It took the realization they were being murdered, each and every one murdered for them to give up hoping for a solution that didn’t require this. Not many cultures can say they reserve violence for self-preservation when no hint for help remains. That is the meaning of ‘Never Again’ and it is the source of Israeli strength: never wait until it is too late but instead make absolutely sure you will not be placed at the mercy of evil again. That is the power of actual victimization, not self-victimization.]

Spoilers included

The more I think about Phantom Thread, the more I’m impressed with the simplicity and subtlety of the love story. It breaks down to this: she loves him and knows he needs to relax, but he can’t. She sees he builds up to a state of fevered intensity and then maybe crashes. She tries to help him but he resists, so she resorts to a rather strange remedy. It works. The key moment is when he sees the image of his mother in the wedding dress he made for her: she has replaced his mother as the one person other than his sister who truly cares for him. She takes this to what is, in the movie, a necessary extreme. And when he realizes this, then he recognizes how much she truly loves him and he gives himself over to her as she has given herself over to him. It’s a love story.

I’ve been doing 30 straight minutes of pounding the heavy bag. It’s a lot. I’m able to do it with 12 oz boxing gloves on, though I don’t move around as much as when I wear lighter MMA gloves. My shoulders were burning after 10 minutes but I worked them out. My original goal today was 20 but I went to 31.

If you treat Trump only as a monkey, then you miss the intelligent things the monkey says. Example: the tweet about the USPS pricing too low for Amazon was widely reported in an almost derisive manner, except he’s exactly right that the USPS loses money and is likely not charging enough to Amazon, that as the biggest package carrier it should charge enough to make a legitimate profit. Maybe the USPS is, but I doubt it and, more importantly, that should be analyzed. I’d love to see if USPS – or any government agency – actually knows the cost of their services like a private company does. They can do the silly thing and divide by some number: pieces delivered by total costs, perhaps even divide by trips and people to the extent they can be allocated, but this kind of cost accounting is crucial to running a business. The failure to understand that is one of the biggest problems small business faces, especially in competition with more sophisticated competitors. I can tell you one thing: the Chinese understand this much better than the US does and that is a source of their overall comparative advantage because they aren’t locking themselves into a labor cost advantage system but are moving up the ladder of sophistication in a way that shows they understand cost considerations to a great depth. One of America’s weaknesses is that unless focused by some externality, it is unable to focus very well on issues like this, preferring instead to allow ‘the market’ to sort things out. It’s certainly true American companies can do this but the knowledge hasn’t spread and isn’t picked up by government.

I realized this when I was thinking about Juvenal and mens sana in sana corpore. Both Jews and Romans are driven to thought and action, both practical thought and action and thoughts and actions in service of something greater. The joining place is that Jews name the unknowable as the unknowable while the Romans had an unnamed unknowable in which they maintained forms of public belief and worship that masked a significantly deeper and more widespread sense these represented something else that was not nameable to or by them. This was reflected in their obsession with how to live as a Roman, with how a person should act as a person. I have more to say about this but this is enough for now.

A little while ago, I decided I was fitter than I believed so I decided to accept that I could do much more. That has happened. I did 30 very hard minutes on the bag in 4 rounds – 10/10/4/6 – then I did 20 minutes in two 10’s and today I did 24 minutes without a break other than a few seconds one time between songs. I could have gone on but I’d mentally set myself for about 20 minutes. The same is true with the weight sled: I’ve been doing 320lbs for 4 pushes – about 22-23 yards per trip – and 4 pulls and then doing one trip hand over hand on the rope, which takes 3.5 rope lengths. I then take off a plate and do the return trip. This after boxing. And then I do more because, bluntly, my fitness has counted up a level. The only negative is that it’s stressing my digestive system. One thing that’s happened with the bag work is that I’ve started to compress more into the crouch and then pop up out of it so there’s more explosion to drive my hands and arms forward. It’s very hard to do repeatedly – hurts a lot after – but it adds a lot of power and speed. It’s not just crouching but contraction into the crouch in a hollow body hold and then springing out of it to generate the core rotation. I’ve also achieved the ability to hold with either lead leg so I torque off either leg about equally now. That took work. This include another achievement: I can roll myself out all over with the steel bar, meaning I can lie with my full weight across a raised steel bar even on the front of my thighs – that took some willpower the first few times. My muscles are much looser and I have no pain to speak of in my hips, shoulders or knees other than when I do really deep knee bend rotations, of the kind I never see anyone do.

Juvenal, Satura X. (As a note, ‘satire’ is one meaning that comes from the word. It originally meant a specific poetic verse form.)

It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.

Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,

which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,

which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,

does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes

the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than

the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.

I will reveal what you are able to give yourself;

For certain, the one footpath of a tranquil life lies through virtue.

orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.

fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem,

qui spatium uitae extremum inter munera ponat

naturae, qui ferre queat quoscumque labores,

nesciat irasci, cupiat nihil et potiores

Herculis aerumnas credat saeuosque labores

et uenere et cenis et pluma Sardanapalli.

monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare; semita certe

tranquillae per uirtutem patet unica uitae.

Note that orare is to ask, pray or remember and that orandum is more, to me, not so much ‘it is to be prayed’ but ‘remember’ or ‘pray’ or ‘ask’. You see the word ‘oracle’ in there as well as words like memorandum. By this, I mean we take Latin and make it passive but the language is actually active, made for the ultimate active people who placed action at the heart of what it means to be a person. This always bothers me about translations. (And my Latin is terrible these days.) I always use basic tests like arma virumque cano, the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid. It is usually translated as I sing (cano) of arms and the man, but the word order is important to a Roman and that says ‘of weapons and the man I sing’. I prefer the word ‘weapons’ because arma refers to what you use to fight and kill, to what you bear as weapons. To me, a Roman would hear that specifically as the Roman active man who takes up weapons as a Roman and that comes first. The typical translation puts the narrator first. I’ve just been looking at a new book of Caesar. It’s excellent but it translates the famous first line something like ‘Gaul, taken as a whole, is divided into three parts’. The actual is simply omnia Gallia est divisa in tres partes, literally ‘all Gaul is divided in 3 parts’. There’s no need to fuck with that.

Juvenal’s actual meaning is very Roman: you want to be an active Roman with an active mind doing active things in service of your life. The reference to Hercules is specific: your life is a labor to make yourself as a person, to aid Rome, to do and to think. It is a command that you should remember and pray and ask to be an active person doing what you can with your mind and body. That is your charge. You can’t be Hercules because Hercules was a demi-God, but you can do what you can do. That way of thinking made Rome great. Turning it into a passive ‘it is to be’ wrecks it.You almost have to read it as ‘Remember it is to be sound mind in sound body’ with the implied ‘you are’ as a command. Romans often used a neuter ‘it’ or third person to implicitly say ‘you’. They talked about stuff knowing that people would hear what was meant. That’s how Cicero ended up with his hands cut off and nailed to the door of the Senate.

Another layer of Roman meaning is that a person has limits and should be regarded for making the most of them. That carries to the disabled: if you can’t fight for yourself and for Rome with your body, then fight for yourself and for Rome with your mind. You can’t all be great but you can be the best of what you are. I sometimes think your obsessions with helping the disabled is meant to cover up, to excuse, to justify your own inability to realize your potential. You can’t really help them until you help yourself. This leads me to a remark: it’s too bad the Jewish fundamentalists couldn’t get along with the Imperial need to express Roman-ness with at least a veneer of religion. And it’s too bad the Emperors couldn’t understand what Jesus said but in reverse, that it would be good if the state kept to its sphere and religion kept to its. Neither can in fact compromise because neither knows its role, with each trying to impose its will on the other. There is speculation perhaps 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish, with higher numbers in the cites of the east. Rome itself was perhaps 10% Jewish.

This may surprise you but the people most like the Jews are actually the ancient Romans. Jews and Romans both do. Both look for practical solutions to fit the problems of the day. Both argue vociferously about direction because it is an obligation of a citizen to care and to articulate those cares and to make appeals. These similarities run very deep because the Roman Empire is the great exception to the rules: it was not religious because, bluntly, a pious Roman did what was necessary and thought doing more a sign you lacked the balance of mens sana, in sana corpore, and Rome at its height was not deeply dynastic but instead, in typical Roman fashion, ran a sham in which the emperor would identify a successor and would adopt him. The similarity is that Jews treat God as the unknowable and Romans did the same because they believed in some God represented by ‘the Gods’ but thought the specifics were stories and metaphors for that unnamed God. The former explicitly named the unknowable and the latter implicitly named it. The Jews name ‘commandments’, the mitzvot, while the Romans made it the subject of their art and culture. The real value is obvious: in sufficient numbers, you can create lasting prosperity and security.