Good morning. Hello. How are you? #529
BofA 2FA, I made a Tik Tok, People are impugning Caro, Inflation
Good morning. Hello How goes it? Issue number 529, woo. I was just talking about 529 plans with some friends yesterday. Apparently New York has a pretty good one! Alas, North Carolina does not. I do not have a North Carolina 529 plan. I have a Kansas one, since that is the one Schwab partners with, and it makes no difference for North Carolinians. I wonder if they will ever change that. If we ever, you know, defeat gerrymandering in this state. Oh, excuse me, defeat gerrymandering and get the Republicans to actually, you know, respect the law, because they have actually lost at gerrymandering several times. They lost three times from the 2010 census and basically ignored all the rulings, all the way up the US Supreme Court, never winning a case. But now we have the 2020 census results and they get to do it all over again — even though we have a Democratic governor and a court order to follow — and it’ll go to court all over again, and they’ll lose three more times and ignore it all over again. Fantastic.
Also, Madison Cawthorn is going to run for a seat in which he does not live, because it’s Republican +20 and his current seat is competitive, and he doesn’t want to, like, be a nice person or compete, and he’s chicken, so he’s gonna go run for that other seat instead. Screwed over the Republican Speaker of the NC house in the process. Classy.
Woah that was a tangent. Anyway.
Programming note: Holiday cards! Fill out the form! Pretty please!
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Big news, Bank of America now accepts the use of a hardware security key for 2-factor authorization, thus becoming the second of our six banks to use either an authenticator app of hardware 2FA. Thank you, BofA.
I made a Tik Tok yesterday. It was my first one. It is an unboxing of Red (Taylor’s Version) and an investigation into whether Taylor remembered to change the color of the little tissue paper stars she includes with each of her records:
(I am somewhat amazed that Substack does not parse Tik Tok URLs into embeds like it does for YouTube and Spotify. That… seems like an oversight.)
Anyway, the thing has like 1,300 views now, not too shabby. I was told Tik Tok’s algorithm was somewhat more sophisticated than other platforms, and one of the reasons for this is that it is very good at a) giving every piece of content a real shot at going viral, and b) sucking in new users with decent metrics. And sho ‘nuff, it did both of those things. I mean, this content is so good I would have expected millions of views and am somewhat disappointed, but that is probably just me. Will I be making other Tik Tok content in the future? If I think of something that seems perfect for Tik Tok again, mayhaps. This content definitely did.
Listened to Peter Gabriel’s Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ yesterday for the first time in years and my god that record is so good. Sometimes in my head canon I mock Peter Gabriel for his world music “thing,” and it has perhaps not aged super well as we evolve our white savior and cultural appropriation storylines. I still think he probably lands on the correct side, though, and man, that record. It’s just phenomenal. A+.
It is cold feet season here in my basement studio. My floor is ceramic, it’s a basement, it’s on a separate HVAC system — a mini split — from the rest of the house and my feet get so cold. I wear my slippers, and that helps. I have a little space heater for my feet but it feels so extreme. I am convinced if I got a ceiling fan and got the heat circulating in this room, blowing downward from the ceiling, I could get them warmer? Is that a thing? Do you do that? I suppose it’s moot, as I do not have a ceiling fan, but I do occasionally think about getting one…
There’s this whole thing going on with Pete Buttigieg and Robert Caro, have you heard about this? Buttiegieg, who in his day job is our Secretary of Transporation, has commented that we should not have racist transportation policies, and used an example from Caro’s The Power Broker to illustrate this, the fact that Moses made all the bridges too low on his expressways in order to keep busses, and, hence, black people, from using them. But now everyone has decided that Robert Caro, the most esteemed biographer of modern times and one of our most decorated historians, was wrong about this, because, reasons. Lots of hand waving and fake science. But at its core, Caro’s claim is based in the fact that the guy who made the bridges sat with him for a hundred hours of interviews and told him, explicitly that this was the case. Then we have the fact that Robert Moses considered black people “dirty,” which is multiply sourced, as is the fact that he was convinced they didn’t like cold pools so he kept pool temperatures low.
Also some people focus on the bridge height only, and not Caro’s larger passage, which clearly shows that the bridge height was part of a larger effort at limiting black attendance to Jones beach. Busses could still make it to Jones beach, yes, but limiting them on the parkways made it harder, as did the shunting of those busses to distant edges of the beach, the limiting of black lifeguards, a permitting system and a system he devised explicitly for this purpose called “Flagging.” Suddenly the bridge height is the only thing, and if someone else who worked on the bridges doesn’t also want to admit to being a racist, and spouts the cover excuse, the whole system is in doubt… mmm hmmm.
How this can be up for debate, with contemporaneous hand-written notes, is insanity.
One thing I love about current American discourse is the completely arbitrary assignment of “proof” to human testimony, depending not on the witnesses’ credibility and motives, but whether or not you want to agree with him. Shapiro has zero motive to lie — hey this crowning thing in my career was totally racist! But the entire discourse just tosses out his very clear testimony because it… doesn’t count!
It’s also kind of stunning to me Caro himself — who is still alive! — hasn’t spoken up in his own defense as a bunch of “historians” decide that he’s… what? Wrong? Lying? Making it up?
Look Mr. Caro I know you’re heads down on finishing volume four of your LBJ bio but I’m thinking maybe you need to speak up here?
We also have a fun inflation debate going on in this country and I just want to put my marker down on “team transitory.” I am convinced that people don’t really care about inflation, or if they do, they view it as temporary. Like they attribute most of it to the backlog at the docks, not expansionary monetary policy. I mean, obviously the crypto dudes and Republicans are all agog at government spending, but I don’t think most people really care. I think most people think that prices are going to go down next year, so they are holding off on making purchases until then, and this is a huge indicator of inflation being transitory: if people believed that prices were going to keep going up, they would be buying everything they can right now, they’re not.
And yes, we see new polls every day about how worried they are about inflation, but these are results from leading questions. If we look at the standard “most important issues” poll from Gallup, that’s been being asked forever, inflation barely ranks as a problem: 5%. Yes, that’s doubled, but it is still low. It’ll be interesting to see what it is in the next version of the poll in 3 days. I suspect it’ll be, like, 10-15%, which is historically high, but still supports my thesis that most people do not see this as the biggest problem.
I also believe that virtually every historical parallel is of hugely limited use, as this is obviously an unprecedented situation without historical parallel.
I also believe that people love acting like they know about this shit, and at best most people have an Econ 201 view of inflation, and it is almost completely wrong. I could be wrong too! We’re in uncharted waters! But I believe that to make an educated guess in this situation demands a much bigger box of tricks than “what I learned from reading The Economist.”
I also believe that after 40 years of no inflation, if we have a bout for a year, even two, it is not that big of a deal — I’m team transitory but not on a 3-month timeline. More like nine. But that is just me, and I recognize that inflation is, somewhat, self-fulfilling.
But I also believe it we had 2 years of inflation and, in 2023, it has leveled off, and the pandemic is gone, and the economy is swell, Biden would be easily re-elected.
I also believe that the Republicans have done a fantastic job convincing Americans that they are not the best party to handle the economy anymore. I haven’t seen a poll, but I suspect that that number has gone down steadily over the last five years. I also believe Trump will have a very hard time convincing anyone he’s the man to fight inflation. But who knows. That guy’s a wild card.
One thing that is super annoying is when you write a daily email, and the world goes on and on about a topic you don’t care about, you don’t think is a big deal, but, you know, you write a daily email that also talks about current events, and as each day goes by you’re like “I don’t care about that,” and it keeps getting talked about and you feel more and more pressure to write something. Best case you stick to your guns, sort of, and write that you “don’t care about that,” but the pressure to have an opinion, and an exciting and interesting opinion is intense! But you don’t care about that! And then your agenda is not your own. I cannot tell you how often I think “god I should write about why that is totally not an interesting thing,” but in the end it’s the same story every time: it’s not interesting, but certain manipulative parties think it is interesting, and think everyone else should worry about it, and then they do. So to even say you don’t think it’s interesting is to give in to them. It’s a bitch.
Okay, anyway, enough of that.
Let’s do a mix! Volume 50. Damn, that is a lot of moody and quiet mixes. Happy 50th, Moody and Quiet mixes, you might be my favorite mix series. My wife says I listen to too much “nap time music.” But who can sleep to the brilliance that is Space Needle’s “Eyes to the World” or Goldfrapp’s “Black Cherry.” Oh my god I saw that tour at the Paradise in Boston does anyone remember that? When she was wearing that black WWII nurse’s uniform with thigh-high patent leather boots and during the climax of “Black Cherry,” confetti exploded everywhere in the club? Just so fantastic. Allison Goldfrapp is a miracle.
Talk to you guys tomorrow!