Standing Tall

In a time when college education is needlessly expensive and is now unable to offer the full campus experience, making an extension of the public high school seems pretty smart. 

The pandemic actually forced the mayor and the Home Run team to push forward the auto-admission and scholarships earlier than intended. Originally, there was a slower rollout planned for each piece, but with the shift to remote learning, financial insecurities, and cancelled senior year events, Mayor Cabaldon wanted the current seniors to get the admission letter and the free tuition “come Hell or high water.”    

I have visited Sacramento a few times and nothing about it stood out as remarkable. It's no San Francisco or Los Angeles atleast for people who are just visiting. But this move to provide every kid a chance to get post secondary education does make it stand out from the competition. One success leads to the next

Mayor Cabaldon has big plans for this new aspect of the Home Run program. In the future, “when you come home from the hospital with your baby, I want you to get a stork basket from the city that includes your child’s future college ID card and a facsimile of a savings bond,” he said. Through simple and cost-effective nudges, West Sacramento is changing not only individual education and career goals, but the mentality of a whole community. “Post-secondary education is our North Star,” said Mayor Cabaldon, “It’s going to happen.”  

Other Side

Spoke to my friend A after several months today. She retired last year after dreaming about that day for a good decade. I have known her a little longer than that but there was never a time when A was not thinking about wrapping up her work life and planning for the years beyond that. She has found a place she loves and is living the dream. A raised several young siblings, grew up poor, motherless and tying to escape the wrath of a mercurial, alcoholic father. That combination seems to have killed her desire for family and motherhood. Always perfectly happy to be single, it seems like A enjoys it even more as she grows older. 

Contrary to the prognostications of her married peers who by now have grandkids, she does not regret her choices and is old enough to know pushing seventy. Talking to A is always energizing for me - she shared pictures of her home that is not fully decorated yet. Each room has its unique touches and all culled from her experience-rich life. She pours her energy in to her living space making it a thing of perfection. Such amazing and undiminished joie de vivre. As always she reminded me that the best life is on the other side of retirement. It definitely is for her and I know for certain it won't be for me. I can understand A in a conceptual way but cannot relate to it at all.  

Quality of Presence

 Reading these lines in the book How to Sit, reminded me of my friend L:

Your actions should be based on the foundation of a high quality of being. Being is non-action, so the quality of action depends on the quality of non-action. Non-action is already something. There are people who don’t seem to do very much, but their presence is crucial for the well-being of the world. You may know people like this, who are steady, not always busy doing things, not making a lot of money, or being engaged in a lot of projects, but who are very important to you; the quality of their presence makes them truly available. They are contributing non-action, the high quality of their presence. To be in the here and the now—solid and fully alive—is a very positive contribution to our collective situation.

Indeed L is exactly the kind of person Thich Nhat Hanh describes. She is home-bound for the most part on account of her disability. She is able to work in her yard still which she does with great pleasure almost all year round. Every season her garden is blooming and producing in different ways. In times of trouble, talking to L always seems like a good idea - not just to me but to everyone who knows her. Grandkids from continents away stay in touch with her regularly as do her neighbors and friends from down the street. The quality of her presence makes us all want her in our lives. You could sit in the same room with her, not exchanging a single word and still feel good. Whatever state of mind you came into that room, you will likely leave it feeling much better.

Self Absorbed

I was reading The Danish Way of Parenting recently and found most of the advisory solid common-sense. Worth a reminder for any parent who is actively child-raising - feeling worn-out and directionless often goes with the territory so a gentle reminder to set aside the emotional, uncalibrated response with a more calm and measured one can only help. This sentence caught my attention:

The Narcissistic Personality Indicator (NPI) was developed in 1970 to assess narcissism, and many studies have demonstrated its validity. Jean Twenge and her colleagues analyzed NPI scores for college students between 1982 and 2007 and found that during that twenty-five-year period, the level of narcissism rose significantly and steadily. The level rose so dramatically that by 2007 nearly 70 percent of college students scored higher in narcissism than the average college student in 1982.

While the obvious conclusion from reading that could be that a higher population of self-absorbed, unfeeling and uncaring people in society would lead to bad outcomes of all kinds including parenting disasters, but there would be more to it. Societal norms would need to adapt to cater to a largely narcissist population -the first of which might be in the way we consume goods and services, That gave me a lot to ponder over.

Coffee Time

Exactly the reason I want an unsmart and unconnected home (and car) as long as possible. My thrift store French press is a good enough for me - it's never going to demand a ransom. This is all amusing to read unless it's happening in your own kitchen:

“Originally, we wanted to prove the fact that this device could mine cryptocurrency,” Hron wrote. “Considering the CPU and architecture, it is certainly doable, but at a speed of 8MHz, it doesn’t make any sense as the produced value of such a miner would be negligible.”

So the researcher settled on something else—a machine that would exact a ransom if the owner wanted it to stop spectacularly malfunctioning the way shown in the video. With the benefit of some unused memory space in the silicon, Hron added lines of code that caused all the commotion.

“We thought this would be enough to freak any user out and make it a very stressful experience. The only thing the user can do at that point is unplug the coffee maker from the power socket.”

Maybe the coffee maker should have been one never to need a power socket

Stirring Feelings

Over the years, I have tried harder to become a generalist and not allow myself to be trapped into technical specializations and list of skills. My resume has gone from being something most recruiters could recognize and properly categorize to something that does not lend itself to such tagging. 

Finding the next thing to do now takes months of concerted effort where two weeks was plenty of time in the past. Yet, I know I am generally on the right track with my avoidance of specialization. It was interesting to read this advice from the investor Chris Sacca in the book Tools of Titans which is a great explainer of why I want to stay out of the specific, hard and tangible and focus on being able to explain why something matters:

"Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”

What is true is venture happens to be fairly true of software sales too. In the end, there is only so much that will differentiate you for your closest competition. If we had to compare two worthy products quantitatively, it would be close to impossible to pick a winner. The customer then asks the two vendors to participate in a bake-off to make a decision. That is the hard and painful way. But if the buyer finds something about Vendor A that stirs their feelings positively and make them want to care deeply about what Vendor A brings to the party, then the deep dive into numbers is often an after-thought. I have seen this to be true in many a deal cycle that I have been a part of.

Measuring Smiles

 In his book The Happiness Industry, the author mentions an interesting social experiment: 

".. an experiment undertaken in the town of Port Phillip, Australia, which carried out an experiment in happiness measurement by stationing researchers around the streets who sought to record how much smiling they witnessed on the faces of those around them. A ‘smiles per hour’ value was produced from one day to the next."

Would it make a difference if the researchers smiled at the people they were observing and recorded if they smiled back. There is a high likelihood that they did. If increasing the number of smiles per hour is a goal that helps society in general, maybe volunteer smilers should be recruited to help bump up that metric. Of this type of metric of happiness, the author notes:

"The cultural effect of this is that certain indicators and measures of happiness take on a moral luminosity of their own. While happiness itself may remain invisible, a smile or a diagnosis of positive health acquires a sort of iconic value. The material symptom or indicator becomes a doorway into some inner being, granting it a magical quality."

Good Persuasion

In Win Bigly, the author makes reference to Plato's allegory of the cave early on. He uses it to explain what is going on in America today:

The point of Plato’s allegory is that—figuratively speaking—we humans might be chained to a cave created by our own faulty brains and senses, experiencing a shadow world that is entirely different from objective reality.

I was drawn to the book for reasons other than understanding how we got here or what the future holds. The idea that persuasion can overcome and obviate the need for facts was more compelling. It mirrors what I have seen in life - both in personal and professional space. Being that I consider myself a logical and analytical person, I have found it deeply frustrating that facts matter so little in decision making and that the absurdity of the results rarely prompt the decision makers to revisit their thinking.

The truth is that facts and reason don’t have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.

Since I am not particularly interested in the subject of this book, it is hard for me to judge it's subjective merits. But on the topic of persuasion there could be something to learn from it

 

Commonsense Innovation

Read two articles almost back to back yesterday and was struck by how much can be achieved using common sense and how misguided some uses of technology can be. In the first instance, it was found that dogs can detect covid by smell with an accuracy of 94% and better. Some dogs can be trained to do this job in a few hours. That is simple, clever and exceedingly useful to society. An example to emulate when thinking innovation and value creation. The second one is about using AI to detect loneliness from speech patterns because people will not come out and tell you they feel lonely. 

“Eventually, complex AI systems could intervene in real-time to help individuals to reduce their loneliness by adopting in positive cognitions, managing social anxiety, and engaging in meaningful social activities,” the researchers boldly conclude in the new study

That sounds like using AI to treat humans like they were hamsters in a wheel and needed to be prodded in specific ways to live their lives meaningfully and productively. Would a chat bot pop up as soon as the speech patterns suggested loneliness and try to quell the problem, bring people together like toddlers to a sandbox so they may play together? 

There is something deeply off-putting about the notion that such intervention is needed. There are reasons why people experience more loneliness today than their prior generations did living in multi-generational family structures, in the same town and village for generations, members of the family being the same or similar trades. A chat bot will not replace any of those structural support systems that have disappeared on us. 

Causing Trouble

 I love re-reading this poem by Naomi Shihab-Nye. This time, these lines made me pause:

Once my teacher set me on a high stool
for laughing. She thought the eyes
of my classmates would whittle me to size.
But they said otherwise.

We'd laugh too if we knew how.

This idea of whittling a kid to size by shame and judgement of peers often ends up having the exact opposite result. The peers who are meant to proscribe end up being in awe, hero-worshipping the one who was stood up on a high stool. What might have started as small act of non-compliance can with such fuel blossom into large scale defiance often just to attract more fuel to burn without any real cause. I think of a about a dozen kids from my childhood who had been similarly named and shamed. In all cases nothing good came out of it. No one I recall every actually felt whittled down to size. They only re-doubled their efforts to stick out and get into "trouble" again, turning into habitual offenders. Over time, the interest in them faded and they blended into the crowd of kids who end up getting little to no value out of school.

Show Stopper

I had my friend L over for dinner a few days ago. Last time we saw each other in person was before the pandemic so there was a lot to catch up on. She is in her early 40s comfortable in her career and a single mom lucky to have an ex with whom it is easy to co-parent. L is one of those people who recognize their blessings and are grateful for them. It's not usual to hear her complain or feel sorry for herself. 

Conversation turned to her dating life or the lack thereof on account of the pandemic. It turns out that singles had gone into hibernation for months while we were all getting used to the lock-down way of life. But recently, things are started to thaw out and there is a date to be had sometimes. Finally after a long time she is starting to meet men who seem right in every way. Yet for three times in a row, three different men revealed something about themselves to her that ended up being a show-stopper. This was after a couple of dates.

The easy theory is that she is self-sabotaging progress in love life but we speculated the real reason may be less obvious. She has friends in their 50s and 60s who have remained single and are in no rush to commit, enjoying the freedom of the dating life on the one hand and grand kids on the other. They have it all - freedom to work the job and hours they like, not be bound to a specific place, time to focus on hobbies and prioritize their health and fitness. 

The presence of grandkids gives them the deep and renewing connection to family. Maybe that is the life L seeks in reality. To get past this stage where she is raising a school age kid and working full-time to meet her financial obligations, to where is it is clear sailing like her older friends who she claims have the "charmed life". It was interesting to see a younger woman visibly envious of those fifteen to twenty years her senior. 

Free Coffee

I became an unwitting customer of Panera's coffee subscription when J forgot to cancel her freebie subscription over summer. Being out nine bucks for the month, decided to make the most of it and get myself a large coffee whenever I was able. For now, I have been able to get one every day but the streak may not last too long. 

J has since canceled her subscription and going out of my way to get a free coffee is not particularly gratifying. The number is compelling for a month of unlimited coffee but when you go through the drill a few days in a row, the allure fades. Like the reviewer, you start to see the problems in the process flow not the benefits. Notwithstanding, the campaign has been a huge success:

..close to 75 percent of coffee redemption occurred off-premises—an element critical to a COVID landscape. And Panera witnessed about a 25 percent hike in new MyPanera members asking for the deal, with a vast majority of those fresh to the brand. It succeeded in driving light users into restaurants.

My own experience made me wonder about the point of inflection in any customer's buying behavior. Say, I was walking distance from a Panera and getting that coffee was part of my routine of catching a short break during the workday. The event would naturally have positive connotations and the coffee would benefit from the halo effect. That in turn would promote my on-going return and desire to renew the subscription. Where it was a bit of an effort to get the free coffee, the inconveniences would manage to overcome the halo effect and therefor decrease the desire to maintain the subscription.

Valuing Formal

Interesting essay on on how loss of formal traditions has cost us democracy. The author argues:

The opportunity to be a crowing pedant about the rules of formality gives one something to do instead of in-grouping around more exclusionary traits, such as to which expensive school one went. More importantly, the rules of formality are ultimately accessible to all. Anyone can learn the etiquette and wear the tie, and so become part of the ever larger, ever more diverse in-group that practices the formality of the event.

He sees colleges as having a vital role here by being the tie that binds students of diverse backgrounds, leveling the playing field and giving the cohort a common and unique framework for life. When the institution pares down the formality to allow a more casual culture, it ends up not fulfilling its mission:

The college needs ritual, tradition, anachronism and whispers of the numinous to bind together this diversity. Not to smooth it out, but to unite it in true engagement. Any apartment building can fill itself with diverse residents who politely acknowledge each other in the hallways, then keep to themselves. It takes a formal, traditional, ritual-filled ancient college to make them all feel as though they’re truly of one kind – even if that ancient college is only a year old.

Doing Over

The past weekend, we managed to crank up our old power washer that was covered with bird-poop and even cleaned up the deck. This job should have been done during the warmer summer months but we seemed to suffer from overall lack of motivation. The days were passing us by, the pandemic was not really getting over and the unending statis remained. A day of work seemed to bleed into a week of work so the weekends were place-holders for nothing. But after the deck was cleaned and the machine returned to the shed, it felt like a good day's work cooler weather notwithstanding. 

Later in the week, I summoned up the courage to go see my dentist for my regular cleaning appointment by now months overdue. My teeth like the deck needed attention and the a power-wash. There was something re-energizing about the deep cleaning. The renewal that spring and summer did not bring, fall did. Everywhere I go these days, I see signs that people want to move on and get on with living. Stores are offering free masks so people who forgot theirs at home will not need to go away. And no surprise that vending machines are in the mix too.

Moral Machine

Results from the moral machine experiment go to show that standards can vary based on culture, economics and geographical location. Interesting how the findings will likely be used in the real world:

The study has interesting implications for countries currently testing self-driving cars, since these preferences could play a role in shaping the design and regulation of such vehicles. Carmakers may find, for example, that Chinese consumers would more readily enter a car that protected themselves over pedestrians.

Seems like a person who is inside a self-driving car should reasonably expect that they would be protected. In the least, the self-driving car would not put them at any greater risk of bodily harm than if they were driving the car themselves. Culture and geography would not impact such baseline expectation of the consumer. In a real life situation, a driver will instinctively try their best not to hit a pedestrian - they understand the trade-off clearly. The person hit by a car will likely die, the driver's life saving maneuver might leave them injured and the car totaled but they will likely survive. If that was not universally true, an extremely large number of jay-walkers would be dying on streets around the world every day. 

An average driver would do their best not to kill another human being. That is because people have a moral compass and killing someone accidentally is a very heavy burden for their conscience to carry. To somehow deny this fundamental truth about our nature and now claim that optimizing for the driver's safety over that of the pedestrian is somehow okay in some cultures seems like inept social science. 

Home Care

Interesting article about the idea of bringing hospital to the home where it's needed. Sounds like a logical next step as technology advances in this area:

.. as technology improved, two-way video calls, remote monitoring of patient vital signs, and easily portable medical equipment such as electrocardiogram machines made it possible to provide more care more reliably in peoples’ homes. Patients who’d otherwise be admitted to the hospital for pneumonia or low blood flow related to congestive heart conditions or an infected wound can now be treated directly in their homes.

For the first time during the pandemic, I used video appointments for doctor's visit. The process was infinitely less painful and saved me a lot of time and aggravation. If people at home were equipment with certain basic tooling doctors could use to check vitals and such, the experience could be even more complete. 

It's great that there is some startup activity to make this possible. Maybe in a decade, being treated at home will become the norm and most people will make it through their lives without needing to go to a hospital. For families that are dispersed there is a great benefit to being able to participate in the process remotely. While being by the parent's bedside may not be logistically possible, the child can login when the doctor does and be part of what goes on.It's hard to put a value on how comforting that would be for the patient and their loved ones.

Time Home

 The pandemic gave me a few months more with J after she had already moved out to college. It was unexpected bounty and I tried to make the most of it without smothering her. Easier said than done as I was to find out. I regressed several times into the babying mode knowing full well that I am dealing with an adult. In response, J slid into a mode that mirrored my attitude towards her. We had progress in fits and starts as I tried to adjust to the new reality of my life - I am the mother of an adult child very close to becoming fully independent. The day I dropped her off at the airport was a hard one. We were excited for her to return to college and unless things went awry, I knew I would not see her for a while. 

Being home for an indeterminate period of time was an experience she did not enjoy - it took away from the freedom that she had only recently earned. After she left, I had time to reflect about the unexpected and rather long visit, perhaps the only one that would happen in a long time. Kids are forging alternate routes to avoid being back home again for lack of options. This experience has proven to a test for their appetite to yield to parental control in lieu of conveniences. For many the control is unbearable and must be overcome. While that may not be the case with J, she definitely has a much stronger yen for freedom now than she did when she returned home earlier this year.

Fog and Sand

House of Fog and Sand is a thought-provoking story. Often in a conflict, both sides could be right and act from good intention. Yet, as the conflict grows irreconcilable, chance are each side starts to cling to its most obstinate, inflexible position. The early intention to find middle ground disappears. Such in the case in this movie as well. Oddly it reminded me of a friend's divorce proceedings, which started out begin a hasty reaction borne of anger and over the years morphed into something absolutely self-destructive. 

With each attack, one side lost more financially and the other lost more on the human scale. And both decided too much was lost already not to fight harder. All around them well-wishers started to fade out - there is only so much conflict outsiders can participate in or feel any sympathy for. Life goes on. In the movie too, as the protagonists circle each other baying and hissing, their universe shrinking to the four walls of the house under dispute, the rest of the world carries on unaware of the trauma being experienced over a house- in the case of my friend, over a marriage that is over. 

It gets to be a lonely and a deathly place in the end and it all the conflict turns out to have been in vain. No one wins. If Kathy and Colonel Behrani could move time's arrow backward, they would have agreed to a very different solution to their problem and both come ahead. 

Good Vibe

My friend T and her husband F share a warm and uncomplicated relationship in which it's easy for others to relax. We have know them over a decade and seem them develop this quiet confidence of a pair that is a self-sustained unit. While they are friendly people, they are have a minimal and selective approach to socialization, valuing their own time together higher than everything else. I know folks that are much more entertaining to be around but not rejuvenating as T and F. 

Their ability to flow together as an organic whole brings a peaceful quality to interactions. It's as if conflict dissolves upon touching them. This must be the thing that others sense as good vibes around them. Over the years when I an interviewing for a job, I find myself increasingly asking to talk to as many members of the team as I can directly or in a small group setting. I find it s a very useful way to decide if we can get along and be productive together. Like this couple, teams that are high functioning often have good, welcoming energy and conflicts tend not to escalate. 

Some scientists suggest that good and bad vibes in a particular place — or, the “energy" of it — may, in fact, be our perception of positive or negative chemosignals left over in that particular environment. In this sense, it may, indeed, be possible to pick up on whether a place has "good vibes." It's important to note that this is a new field of research. There are still a lot of unknowns.

Being Mothers

 On J's birthday some time back, my father shared some pictures of my mother and I from the time we were that age. My mother was engaged to be married at that age, she would never  complete her bachelor's degree,  and I was still in college like J. Three generation of women and how far apart we are. Looking at these old pictures made me think about the acceleration a mother is able to provide her daughter. You do the best you can based on your life circumstances to create new possibilities for the next generation. For my mother it was about me getting a professional education and acquiring financial independence. That was a big deal from her vantage point. Because she succeeded, I was able to do better for J. 

And yet there are women in the chain of mothers who don't quite step up, leave their daughters lagging behind. Such was my maternal grandmother - she was too mentally absent and could not help her daughter get a few steps ahead of her. If anything my mother and aunt fell behind and had to work much harder on their daughters to make up for it. The loss could be multi-dimensional at that point and cascade in unexpected ways through the generations. My cousin is a remarkable woman and has built a career for herself overcoming serious odds with my aunt always by her side to assist. My life flowed a bit differently than hers but we likely have the same blind-spots. We have helped our girls in some areas and mostly failed them in others because our mothers were lop-sided creatures, trying to do the best with the hand they had been dealt.

Learning Gap

A large number of J's peers are taking a gap semester if not a gap year for reasons students echo in this PBS story.  It's interesting to see how differently kids are planning to use their semester or year off. Some of the most cautious and ambitious ones are combining online college with travel abroad and work. L is one such kid we know. She will be working for a whole academic year in a different country with some pretty serious time zone challenges to manage as she goes to her American college online from there. In effect she is combining college and gap year to make lemonade out of pandemic lemons.

She's always been a very determined person and would go way above and beyond her peers - so this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows her. The parents are both academicians and the mother got some advanced degree with two kids in middle and high school. Not a family of slackers that is for sure and maybe that is where L gets her incredible work ethic. What this kid is doing is very astute and she will likely come out better off as a result of the pandemic chaos. But not everyone is L - all gap year plans are not quite as well-formed and certainly not every kid is cut out to work this hard to achieve their goals. 

Living Nostalgia

On the side of the street by a restaurant that had outdoor seating, a group of four high school kids had set up shop to play some sax. When we happened to pass by they were playing Sweet Dreams. They had enough swagger to make up for lack of musical perfection. People around looked on appreciatively. It was wonderful to see them make the most of the times we live in these days - online school, no sports or other activities, and a generally diminished high school experience. Instead of sitting it out at home, these three had decided to take initiative, come out and play music, entertain and make a few bucks. 

As we continued our walk, we came up on a even younger musician tuning his violin. Maybe a family of musicians or close friends atleast. In the midst of the relentless sameness that the pandemic has brought, it was so heart-warming to see these youngsters make music from a whole another time to entertain us older people with music from our times. 

Power of Red

The AOC make-up video is probably the only YouTube make-up tutorial I have ever watched end to end.  I love that she makes being feminine about power and control. Just because a woman knows to use make-up and chooses to spend an hour in front of the mirror to get ready for the day does not make her unintelligent, lacking seriousness or otherwise incompetent. It is a fantastic message for young women to hear as they go out into the world, trying to understand and respond to stereotypes they have to contend and overcome. 

She talks about the power of loving yourself. There is also the element of feeling that you deserve to spend the time on your look, on how to appear in the mirror to yourself and to the world. In emotionally distressful times, women can't pull themselves together sometimes do pretty up their faces. So what stares back at them from the mirror is the sadness, stress and insecurity they so need to snap out of. The cycle could break if they experienced love for themselves for a bit, used that time to accentuate the beauty nature had given them.

One of my aunts went through a long period of depression in her thirties. I remember how on her relatively better days she would wear a beautiful sari, apply make-up and style her long hair into a bun. It was like the sun had emerged from behind the clouds. When we kids told her how wonderful she looked,it always lifted her spirits and seemed to provide some fuel to battle her demons. Sometimes she had a streak of several such days. Over time, we started to see her more in this happy uplifted state, color coordinated and made-up. Maybe there were other things in play that we did not know about but she did overcome in the end, I remember she too was the fan of a bright red lipstick. 

Hand Mind

I have started sewing a bit more seriously these days - never had a sewing machine until recently. Not sure why such an essential thing was missing from my home all these years. I work on my simple projects whenever I have a few minutes. They could happen between meetings on a workday, before going to bed or on sometime during the weekend. Being able to focus intently on a task where hand and mind have to work in synchronicity is deeply rewarding even if my productions are no work of art. Learning the basics is relatively simply but acquiring expertise is a whole another matter. 

I can do simple alterations now and sew a mask. But that is a far cry from where I dream of being in level of proficiency. My friend A who has been a life-long tinkerer, encouraged me to get a jump start on projects instead of building from ground up. Pick up something from the thrift store and up-cycle it using the the skills I have learned. As time goes by I will learn more and do a better job of up-cycling. Starting from zero will not be nearly as rewarding based on his own tinkering experience. Like the author of the handmind article says of these times:

"..one of the effects of Covidtide, I think, is that by forcibly breaking some of our technological habits it creatively destabilizes others. To have any one thoughtless pattern of life disrupted is to be put into a frame of mind that allows you to contemplate the deliberate disruption of a different thoughtless pattern. Thus all the people who, after three months of baking bread, are now saying that they’ll never go back to buying their bread from the supermarket. They probably will buy bread from the supermarket; but they’ll know what they are doing, and why. And this is useful knowledge."

Random Wisdom

Interesting interview in WSJ with the CEO of Netflix where among other things he does not see any positives of working from home. One quote the interviewer cites is "Only a CEO who is not busy is really doing their job." That is definitely an interesting one. Hastings explains his perspective:

You don’t want to be, as CEO, consumed by the tactics. For me, making casting decisions or product feature decisions—there are too many to make. You get too busy so that, even if you are good at it, you’re not thinking about the long-term health and evolution of the business. You want to really know what’s going on in all kinds of places, but not making decisions.

Seems to be working for him and Netflix that the CEO does not make the decisions. Wonder how that would pan out for much smaller business that Hastings seeks to inspire with his book. That CEO will likely not have the resources to hire the top talent with the best salaries in the business. What is more they will not have a fleet of trusted lieutenants they can count on to make the right decisions at all times. Knowing what is going on is only ten percent of the total work that the CEO must do in order to survive and grow their business. 

This piece of wisdom sounds a lot like a fitness and wellness guru who spends eight hours of her day improving her body and mind advising the rest of us to emulate her when thirty minutes would be all we can devote to our body and mind combined on any given day. 

Toxic Positivity

 Learned a new phrase today - toxic positivity. It is described  as 

"..the assumption, either by one’s self or others, that despite a person’s emotional pain or difficult situation, they should only have a positive mindset or — my pet peeve term — ‘positive vibes,’” explains Dr. Jaime Zuckerman, a clinical psychologist in Pennsylvania who specializes in, among other things, anxiety disorders and self-esteem.

Toxic positivity can take many forms: It can be a family member who chastises you for expressing frustration instead of listening to why you’re upset. It can be a comment to “look on the bright side” or “be grateful for what you have.”

I can't claim I have encountered this but the general idea makes sense. I happen to know a lot of young people with lives a lot less complicated than my own. Many only have a dog or a cat to worry about if that. They are not in a committed relationship yet and there are no kids. Home can be wherever the best apartment rental deal is. So despite the havoc being wreaked by the pandemic, their lives are relatively untouched - specially the ones that are gainfully employed. They can exude a lot of good vibes and positivity which I generally find invigorating. 

But it is hard to relate to a twenty something year old who ran his dog in the park over the weekend, did his laundry, Netflixed and chilled after because it was such a long week. That said, none of my younger friends would be dispensing platitudes like "be grateful for what you have" or "look on the bright side". I don't talk to them about what keeps me up at night or about problems they have no life experience to help with. Maybe that's why I don't experience the toxic element here.

Domestic Misery

Read two articles recently - one by Paul Krugman about Gross Domestic Misery in America and the other about the K-shaped recovery in India. Both are about a very small minority getting ahead despite the pandemic and sometimes befitting because of it while the vast majority gets left far behind. That is what creates the K in the story about India and the increasing Gross Domestic Misery in the Krugman story. The Print article points out a common theme that ties many countries together in their failure to do right by its people in the time of a generational crisis:

But increasingly, governments don’t have the capacity or the competence to deal with the scale of what confronts them. This encourages escapism through the politics and economics of nationalism, made worse by tribalism or nativism, the package accompanied inevitably by the erosion of institutional bulwarks and therefore state capture by powerful businessmen. Typically, the political and economic winners are not the same.

Its frightening to imagine how this will end if there is one. Some businesses will close never to return and that list is ever growing. No one is really immune to this. I know several retirees who have been forced to rejoin the workforce in some capacity because they can no longer count on things they could before the pandemic hit. 

Reading Right

When I started reading The Vegetarian, I was intrigued. An odd premise and catalyst for marital dissolution - the wife goes vegetarian one day because she had a dream. She descends into madness from there. Stranger things happen to people and to their marriages so why not this. By the time the action turned to the husband and his predilection for painting flowers on the body of his naked sister-in-law and then recording it, I was not sure I was following the plot anymore. 

The book seems to be well-written even in translation, but something seems off. Its like we go on a hike, following a well marked trial and all looks great and suddenly we take a detour to be adventurous and simply can't find our way back to the main trial. Consequently, what started out being a nice hike ends up being a frustrated aborted mission.

Reading this review by a bi-lingual writer, offers some insight into the ailment of this book in its English translation. In describing the work of the translator Deborah Smith, he says:

Even if Smith had corrected all the obvious errors, it still wouldn’t have changed that she “poeticized” the novel. In terms of tone and voice, “The Vegetarian” is strikingly different from the original.

For one thing, Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original. This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page. Taken together, it’s clear that Smith took significant liberties with the text.

I find it hard to come up with an adequate analogy, but imagine the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens. Smith’s embellishments create more suspense and interest for the English reader, but for those who can read the original, it can be quite jarring.

Maybe that is it - by giving Carver a Dickens make-over, Smith has managed to confuse the heck out of the clueless reader who has no foundational understanding of the culture the characters come from. With that it becomes all but impossible to understand their actions and motivations as the story unfolds. 

Sign of Times

Sad state of education with kids and parents gaming the exam scoring AI for perfect grades. If the system is so lazy and dumb this is only expected. Just like the resume scanners weeding out the best people out of the candidate pool, such a system will ensure kids who care about learning fare the worst and those who put their efforts into scamming will be well rewarded. It is exactly as the author says:

It seems that one useful outcome of the pandemic, if we're looking for some kind of silver lining, is that it has put on full display just how inept we are as a nation in so many ways. Federal responses, personal behavior, our medical system, and our financial system are all basically getting failing grades at every turn.

I wonder if after all the fun and games are over, schools will get sued for being negligent in their teaching. Clearly they should have done better than have an AI grade exams and have no proper way to check if kids were attending class or not. My friend T is battling with her teen everyday as he comes up with more and more creative ways to be lazy as school is now fully online. He has a programmed chat-bots, browser extensions and more to be his digital presence in class while he sits around doing nothing remotely useful. T is at her wits end with her son but this is new territory for all parents and no one is quite the fountain of wisdom on how to corral kids in such unprecedented times where adults in charge are failing them in spectacular ways. 

Reading Leaves

Drones are in the news a lot but this is quite the novel use case - using it to scan leaves of trees in a forest that could point to the presence of a dead body in the vicinity. Whether or not this experiment is successful, there could be other applications along similar lines. Maybe the level of color or reflectance of leaves in a forest could point to other issues going on there that may warrant a closer look. Could be true for farms as well. 

Reading this for some reason reminded of the locust invasion event in Things Fall Apart. Generally considered a pretty dire event by farming communities, the author describes how the Igbo prepare to catch them and feast on them. In contrast, the cicada invasion that made news recently was viewed as a destructive event and those impacted responded accordingly

She has sprayed the orchard grounds with poison to keep down the number of emerging nymphs, as young cicadas are called, but has been careful to leave the trees alone. Ms. Noonkester said she did not want to kill the spiders and other predators that eat the cicadas

If it becomes possible to learn more about the lives of plants and trees using drone technology as the Ars article describes, chances are we may respond with undue force when the situation is perceived to be harmful to us and our livelihoods. 

Dried Altruisn

My friend N and her husband are in the garment and fabric business. N designs upholstery and such, her husband works for a garment exporter. With the pandemic impacting their lines of work, he had been laid off from his job and N has had to take a fifty percent pay-cut. This is an established household with three school-age kids a couple of pets, home and car. The retired parents of N are dipping into their pension to  help them keep the grand-kids enrolled in school while the couple figures out how to get back on their feet in Mumbai. N has a younger sibling whose business has thrived during this time. He was affluent to begin with and now is quite rich. There is a certain squalid quality to this story - the younger sibling standing by as his sister is forced to pull her kids from school unable to pay tuition. To make it worse, the parents who don't have much to begin with are stepping in to rescue. 

The larger circle of friends and relatives have heard about N's woes but no one is willing or able to step in to rescue. The times are equally uncertain for everyone, there is no desire for grand gestures right now. No one there has the means to support a family of five in Mumbai for an indefinite period of time. Those kids need to go to school for the next five to seven years. The job that N's husband lost is likely not coming back anytime soon. And even if it does, it may go to someone who is a lot cheaper to hire than him. It is only a matter of time before N is let go from her job - that is her understanding of where things are headed for her. She has been offered a life-line for now. People are spooked by the turn of events in N's life - how quickly it all fell apart. N has become the canary in the coalmine and others are thinking it may be them next. Such fear dries up any desire for altruism very quickly. I am guilty of that myself.