Good morning. Hello. How are you? #725
Parenting, 3M thermal copy machines, bitching about the Fed, the Half-Cocked soundtrack's surprise guest, Star Trek Lower Decks and Trek canon
Good morning! Hello there, how’s tricks, what’s new, how are you holding up in this world? Doing okay? I hope so. I should start out by saying something that I should have said yesterday: being a pharmacist for the public must suck, the public is filled with lunatics and man people can be freaking insane. My nemesis probably has a very difficult job. He’s still a dick, though. None of the other pharmacists at this CVS are ever even remotely mean. Not an ounce of meanness in any of their bodies. But to be clear, I am sympathetic to the perils and trials of the job. But man, that guy sucks.
Also that CVS offers delivery for a nominal fee but I don’t take that option. I don’t know why. I am a glutton for punishment I guess. The inner Catholic looking for abuse. Not that I was raised Catholic. As far as I am aware Methodists did not look for abuse, but, then, I skipped most services and ran around down unsupervised trying to put xerox-copied dollar bills into vending machines, which worked more often than you would think. Man, I can’t believe we did that. Just skipping church and casually committing federal crimes. White privilege. The 70’s. Wait, no, it was the 80’s by then. The frontier. My dad bought this weird 3M copy machine at a charity auction. I don’t think he even really wanted it he was just being nice. But it was a thermal copy machine. Like it made a copy onto a big piece of paper that came off a roll, and heated the copy onto it, like a Chipotle receipt. Such a weird machine. He never used it, but we made a lot of copies of dollar bills, let me tell you. Apparently those machines are still widely used by tattoo artists. Hrm. Fascinating.
Being a parent is insane, you know? I mean it really is just crazy. My friend Doug said something about it recently: “one thing that’s weird is you make your own friend.” And this is true. Like Jane is a little buddy sometimes. Not always, and they’re not into all the things you’re into, but you basically choose most of their activities, so you can choose activities you find tolerable, and then do them with them. That is a thing. I spend more time with Jane than any human save my wife, and even that, well, run for the money. Yesterday at breakfast Jane said “learn about something new?” And so I decided today was the day we were going to talk about money. We talked about money and dollar bills and buying things and selling things and saving and paying people to do things. I gave her twenty dollars and then sold her a bracelet for twenty dollars. Then I bought a bite of waffle from her for twenty dollars. Now she owns twenty dollars. She found it all very fascinating and wanted to talk about money the next day, but, then, she was obsessed with parkour for exactly two days, so we shall see if it sticks.
But really, the poor girl is stuck in a routine and I think she’s bored. For the last two days when she’s woken up she’s asked me if she can have a mommy breakfast instead. I keep telling her she needs to ask mommy during the day to do a mommy breakfast and she forgets to do that, but that is only going to work another couple days. She’s also asking for different things to eat, different breakfasts. Things have gotten too routinized and she’s bored, she wants new things, new experiences, which is totally fair. We’ve been in the same routine for years now. I want new experiences and routines too, Jane. She was so excited when Nick came to visit. New experiences! Of course I try to not take it personally but I can’t say it’s great when your first contact with a human in the day is them telling you they prefer someone else.
Yesterday Emma and Grammy took Jane to the park and the playground and she had a great time and was very well behaved and Emma ran into a friend of ours at the playground. I love it when that happens, when one of us runs into someone we know out in the world, makes me feel like we live in a society, in a community. Jane and I also ran into someone we knew at the park when we went there a couple weeks ago when Emma was at DragonCon. We live in a society.
We’re taking Jane to Baltimore to see New Order and the Pet Shop Boys next week. Oh, that’s right, hey Liisa and Mia if you’re around we’re coming to Baltimore next week. We already told Keith. I gotta let people know. Mia just had a baby though, she is probably distracted. Anyway, that’ll be a new thing for Jane. Excited about that. Gotta see these bands while you can. Neil Tennant is 68. Bernard Sumner is 66.
Speaking of aging rockers I recently took possession of a vinyl copy of the Half Cocked soundtrack. The Half Cocked soundtrack is a seminal moment in a certain underground, American, southern school of “indie” rock: Rodan, Sleepyhead, Freakwater, Polvo, Retsin.. goes a little further afield with Helium, Slant 6, Sonic Youth spin-off Two Dollar Guitar. Anyway, I’ve never seen the movie, it’s impossible to find, but I’ve owned this soundtrack on CD since it came out. But I sold it recently on Discogs. Well, quite a while ago, but I put a wantlist marker on the vinyl on Discogs agesy ago, six years ago actually, and a copy finally came up for sale and it was cheap so I bought it and I am happy and it is great.
Anyway, weird thing: The first track on the soundtrack is called “Snoopy,” and it was made by an unlisted band. Like it did not have a band listed on the track listing. Always thought that was a little weird. But of course now in this digital age we know everything, and you can’t put a song on Spotify that doesn’t have an artist, so it turns out that “Snoopy” was written by Jeff Mueller from June of ‘44, the legendary Jason Noble from Shipping News, Rodan and Rachels… and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. I knew James had an indie rock past but that is legit.
So new numbers came out, inflation was still shitty last month. A smidge better but not especially. I found that a little surprising because it doesn’t feel that way to me but what do I know I never buy gas, my mortgage is fixed, my food is more expensive, but not more than it was during low-inflation times. I kinda thought things were getting better. So that sucks because now the Fed has backup for their lame-ass rate hikes they’re going to keep doing. It really is weird to me how they have decided to completely ignore half of their mandate — the full employment half — for the inflation-fighthing half. I was kinda confused about this, like I was missing something, but then I read this Stephanie Kelton column and… nope. They’re just pretending arbitrarily that one part of their mandate is more important than the other. Then there’s this in the comments to Kelton’s column:
I asked Neel Kashkari of the Mpls Fed if the issue isn’t a supply side/production issue, and that raising interest rates will only limit or reduce hiring. He said while maximizing employment is one of the Fed’s two pillars, controlling inflation via interest rates is presently a higher priority.
Ahh okay. Makes sense. You just decided one is more important than the other. Definitely what congress had in mind when they gave the fed a dual mandate: Your job is to keep employment high and fight inflation, but when in doubt, just pick the one you, personally, care about more, mmkay?
Kelton also says:
There’s a tendency for people to think of inflation like the flu, where the pain is generalized. It hurts everywhere. With today’s inflation, pretty much everyone has to suffer the “pain at the pump” or feel the sting at the grocery store checkout. In contrast, many people think of unemployment as a sort of localized pain. Sure, it hurts the guy who gets laid off or the woman who struggles to find work but never manages to land a job, but as long as I don’t lose my job… (and I promise you that Jason Furman, Larry Summers, and the authors of that Brookings paper face a near zero probability of job loss as a result of a Fed-induced recession.)
I mean, now, I guess I’m old fashioned, but I thought this was the point of government, the point of society, the point of being a good person: that we all share the burden so it does not fall unfairly, and more harshly, on a random few. But I guess not. I guess the point is to strategically manage things so some people get hurt really bad, so important voters do not get hurt at all.
And this is the democrats! I mean, sure, Powell, independent Fed, but Biden re-appiointed the guy. You know Biden, in his oldness and presidency, is secretly thankful he has Powell to blame, and probably believes this is the right thing to do because he was around during Reagan and Greenspan and was a conservative then and hey it worked then, and he’s not exactly keeping up with the vanguard of progressive economic research these days.
Kelton also refers to a study that was super intersting: People are nine to 13 times as likely to report sadness or physical pain in the short term when there’s been a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate as when there’s been a one-percentage-point increase in the inflation rate. This feels intuitively true to me. Republicans have been moaning about inflation because it’s a great political issue, especially in the absense of any unemployment, and of course, we do feel inflation, it’s a real thing. Well, I don’t, but I assume people do. But it’s nothing like the generalized unhappiness that high unemployment brings.
But whatever. The fed wants what the fed wants, and so Powell is intentionally going to give us “a sustained period of below-trend growth” with “softening of labor market conditions.” On purpose.
We have learned nothing as a society, I swear to god.
Public Service Announcement: Star Trek Lower Decks is one of the best TV shows on TV my god it is so eternally satisfying. I assume this is somewhat, though not completely, diminished if you are not a hard core Star Trek fan because you’ll miss some of the absolutely brilliant background and sight gags, but I suspect it’s hilarious if you have even a passing knowledge of the show. Watching it last night I couldn’t help but wonder if the powers-that-be at Memory Alpha, the canonical wiki for Star Trek lore, considered Lower Decks in all its absurdity, canon, and so I checked out the article on the Pakleds, and sure enough, Memory Alpha considers Lower Decks canon and that makes me so, so happy. It’s also a testiment to the show: it’s absurd and hilarious but does not, fundamentally, break the rules of the Trek universe. It is the warm humor of love. So great.
Got a modern classical mix for you. It is hella long, and verrry mellow, sorry. Might want to listen to it at night. It’s really good, though. I promise. I’ll try and make the next one more upbeat. In, like, six months or so when I get to another one.
All right. Have a lovely Wednesday. Wednesday was a day made for loveliness. Definitely.
Nice shirt, sir! ; )