Good morning. Hello. How are you? #736
Ian damage, more on CO2 monitors, a Nobel-winning endorses GMHHAY-nomics, listing things that you definitively improved during COVID domesticity
You know, just before I started to write this, I thought to myself, “huh it’s weird how you always write this email in the morning. You should acknowledge it in some way. Like maybe wish everyone good morning or something.” Does that mean I’ve been doing this for too long? Maybe, maybe. Anyway, Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well?
Would like to start by apologizing: It is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, not Cady Elizabeth Stanton. This is probably why that bartender Cady was so confused when I asked her if she was named after Cady Elizabeth Stanton. Man. My whole life I have gotten that one backwards. Weird.
Woah we just had a brief power outage. Only a couple seconds, but enough to disrupt this computer. Though not, I am seeing, the other computers in the house. Weird. I thought this computer was on a UPS. Gonna need to double check that. But it ties into my first topic of the day, which is Ian. We mostly came out of Ian unscathed. A lot of rain, a low-level but constant wind, nothing major. We lost a tree, though. It had already been damaged, and it was bent, clearly from a previous tilting incident, but these last few years it had been growing nicely. It was where we are ultimately, probably, going to do some landscaping anyway, so it probably wasn’t long for this world, but it had a few years left in it and I’m sad to see it go.
Spent a lot of the weekend trying to chop it up. Got it cut down, and cut into segments, but not fully converted into firewood and mulch. The rain would take breaks but every time we went out there to work on it, it started raining again, so there’s still a fair bit to do.
If we’re being honest, Chapel Hill failed completely in this hurricane. It was so, so minor and it is ridiculous how many power outages there were all through the town of Chapel Hill as well as in the surrounding environs. At one point every neighborhood adjoining us was out of power, we were the only neighborhood standing. This was not a bad hurricane here! We have had much worse! I shudder to think how things would hold up in a real storm. (long think piece about climate change resiliency in even apparently “safe” towns, and federal funding and preparedness, etc. etc. we all know this).
Picking up from Friday, many, many of you emailed and asked about my CO2 monitoring system. I will elaborate! CO2, of course, is not that terrible in and of itself, it’s in our air. But a high CO2 level means that a room does not have good ventilation. And a room without good ventilation does not guarantee it’s a room with COVID pestilence in it, but these days, with any crowd, you can assume the room probably has COVID cooties. Having a low CO2 count means there’s less of a chance you’ll be exposed in a prolonged nature to the COVID cooties. It’s really astonishing just how much a cracked door or window can make a difference. I mentioned that several bars in NYC are now checking for IDs, weirdly. But one good side effect of that is that there’s a big burly dude sitting at the door, usually with the door open, and that little bit alone has a profound impact on keeping CO2 levels low.
Also on road trips. If you ever take a long road trip in your car, and you keep recirculate on, it’s crazy how high the CO2 levels in your car will get. Of course it’s your own breath so you’re not gonna catch COVID from someone, but heightened CO2 levels will make you tired, so turn off that recirculate if you’re feeling sleepy on a long drive.
The CO2 Monitor we use is the SAF Aranet4. There are cheaper ones, but the Aranet4 is the Cadillac of CO2 monitors. The e-ink display means it lasts forever on one set of batteries, it is the smallest one, really, so you can keep it in your pocket even if you don’t have a handbag, and it syncs back to your phone or computer later for historical analysis. It is not cheap but it’s great and can really provide an extra layer of information and protection. I hit day five today from the NYC 10-bar bar crawl and I just got my next Negative COVID test, and I am assigning the credit to the Aranet4. Strong reccommend, even as COVID ‘dies down’ (lol yeah right), maybe even doubly-so since you may be considering, you know, going out more. Emma used it at Dragoncon where the situation was not good and emerged unscathed:
All right do you remember a few months back where I wrote a whole thing about bitcoin and tulips? I’m gonna pull a rare self-quoting situation here. But here, to refresh your memory:
This Galbraith book got me thinking about Tulips. You know, Tulips are awesome.They are very pretty, they smell lovely, they come in all sorts of colors. I can’t quiteimagine why an entire country, and continent, would lose its mind about them and mortage everything to the hilt to buy more and more increasingly expensive tulips. That does seem a little weird. But underneath tulipomania was… the tulip. And tulips, if you think of them in any other context besides tulipomania, are really pretty cool.
Plus, here it is, four hundred years after tulipomania, and tulips are still really cool, they are still very pretty, they are still with us. Tulips rule.
Except, of course, Tulips only rule in the Bevisean, Buttheadean sense. They do not, in any way, shape or form, rule the world. They do not have a negligible impact on anyone or anywhere. Looks like the Netherlands are still the largest producing country, with a tulip industry of $250 million annually (forgive me for relying on Statista here, I am lazy, this is not an academic paper). The GDP of the Netherlands is just shy of $1 trillion. So it looks like tulips make up two and a half percent, ish, back-of-napkin of the Netherland’s GDP.
I think, when we think about crypto, and other bubbles, we forget about the ultimate outcome of tulips. We tend to think in extremes, in either direction. The whole thing will crash and is a giant scam and will die off in a spectacular catastrophe, possibly taking the global economy with it, or it will be a revolutionary change, ushering the world into a new age of prosperity of wealth redistribution and service to the global banked.
But it feels like history is telling us something different: that we still have tulips. The Beanie Baby market on eBay is still very active. There is still a giant amount of “wash trading,” sketchy $20k+ sales of beanie babies with one bid that is obviously fake. But there are still thousands of Beanie Babies being sold with 30, 40, 50 bids in the $100-200 range. I’m no Schumpeter die-hard, not the biggest fan of creative destruction. I have a bit more time for Carlotta Perez, and her economic cycles. But I am not really talking about that. Perez and Schumpter make the implicit claim that the new tech, after the hype cycle, has something new and innovative implicit in the tech, and that after the hype cycle, the tech can hunker down and get on with the business of innovating. I’m not saying that.
(Huh weird. The blockquote button has disappeared from Substack. Ok, then. You get a code block. WTF).
Anyway, I am reading a book now, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J Shiller. I will have much more to say about this book, and its focus on narrative, in a subsequent issue, but really the book is pretty much what it says. A book about the power of narrative in economics. I love these kinds of books. They’re basically like intro 101 books to some topic, because economists are idiots and need to be taught like babies about a topic, so that they can incorporate this manifestly important topic, which no human actually debates has a profound impact on our world, into their comically rudimentary and bullshit models. But they’re always nice, because they serve as a quick sort of primer on the latest academic work on a topic, since economics won’t believe anything is important or matters unless it’s in an academic paper.
Robert J Shiller won the Nobel prize in economics. Not for his work in Narrative Economics, which is rewardingly commonsense, but rather “for their empirical analysis of asset prices” (he won it with two other people). Smart dude. Is an econ prof at Yale and also used all those smarts to start a hedge fund, so, you know, eat the rich, but still. Gotta give him props on his smarts.
Which leads me to this gem of a passage in Narrative Economics
For Bitcoin’s advocates, labeling bitcoin as a speculative bubble is the ultimate insult. Bitcoins supporters often point out that public support for Bitcoin is not fundamentally different from public support for many other things. For exampkle, gold has held tremendous value in the public mind for thousands of years, but the public could just as well have accorded it little value if people had started usingf something else for money. People value gold primarily because they perceive that other people value gold. In addition, Peter Garber, in his book Famous First Bubbles (2000), points out that bubbles can last a long time. Long after the seventeenth-centure tuliop mania, rare and beautiful tulips continued to be highly valued, though not to such extremes. To some extent, tulup mania continues even today, in diminished form. The same might happen to Bitcoin.
Look at that! Now, he does credit this Peter Garber gentleman, a lowly non-Nobel-winning economist who seems to be a professor at lowly Brown, but still! I choose to believe the very last sentence of that paragraph, applying those lessons of Tulips to Bitcoin, was Shiller’s work, not Garber’s.
Which means I totally dreamed up a theory backed by a Nobel-winning economist. See? Economics is easy. Don’t let these bastards fool you.
Been trying to compile a list of things that I manifestifly, definitively improved in my life from the pandemic years. Like all that domestic work we put into things in 2020 before we got depressed and stopped. Some of them were a complete waste of time. But some of them were great! I feel like I got 200% better at domestic living, and some of it has really given me a lot of rewards since then. Here is my partial, ongoing list:
The FIFO stack organization of the pantry is just great
I am very glad I consolidated onto a single modern tool battery platform, Dewalt 20 volt. I just wish I had gond with Milwaukee. But it’s still much better than the old situation.
Deeply grateful I got really good at making New York-style bagels (thank you, Katherine!)
The PS5 is really a gift that keeps giving.
The new desk chair was a purchase that makes life better every day
The workbench building and pegboard organization in the garage has been fantastic
This list will continue.
Wore a mask around my wife and daughter for three days after my trip to New York. Jane hated it the first day, but then we had a conversation where she told me it was ugly and a bad color (it was black). We went to the laundry room and through the mask pile and she picked out a Pink mask. So I’ve been wearing a pink mask around the house for the last three days. I thought you guys should know that. Jane said it was very cute. She’s also back on her parkour kick. A new video may be in the works.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today. Listening to the Lambchop song right now, so that decided it. A ton of new music last week, I’m still working my way through it. Haven’t listened to the new Bjork, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Melvins or Pixies or Titus Adronicus or High Vis or LCD Soundsystem. Hopefully today!
Have a lovely week. October! What fun. Emma is decorating for Halloween already. Not that she ever undecorated from 2021. Spooky!