Good morning. Hello. How are you? #760
NYC's new pay law, Taylor's tour, NC stadium capacities, tech paranoia extended to kinda benign new apps, text a friend.
Good morning! Hello, there, friend. How are you today? All well? I hope so, I hope so. I’m good. I had a very pleasant Tuesday, which is nice. Like I said, busiest day of the week for me. Not usually a fan of Tuesdays. I had to skip one meeting for another (regular, standing) meeting. Hoping that is not my chief takeaway here: skip the regular, standing meeting, and you will be happier. That is not fitter, happier, more productive. Jane and I had a lovely time at bedtime. She was recalcitrant, but I killed her with kindness, and her argumentativeness could not stand in the face of my relentless happiness and silliness. This is obviously the way to go and, 90% of the time, almost impossible emotionally. But when you can pull it off, you feel like a super parent. We did some Parkour. We did some dancing. We watched Cardboard World, we looked at cars.
Jane has been calling Emma and I “Emma” and “Rick” lately, instead of “Mom” and “Dad.” Of course this is a phase every kid goes through and we were expecting it but I thought it would be a bit later than… five years old. Emma’s resorting to just not answering to “Emma” but I am trying to just ignore it and hope it goes away. So, you know, all-pro parental mixed signals I’m sure well get exactly what we want out of it.
Look, I never saw Julie and Julia. I thought the idea for the movie was dumb. To clarify, I thought Julie Powell’s original project of cooking every recipie in Mastering The Art of French Cooking and blogging about it was amazing and brilliant and exceedingly up my alley. And I thought Nora Ephron was cool. And I thought Julia Childs was pretty cool. But I didn’t think we needed a movie about it. And I didn’t like how they added Julia Childs to what was essentially Julie Powell’s story. But this does not mean that I have not deeply respected Julie Powell as a writer, as a blogger and as a human being, faults and all, living her life and writing about it in a way that I admired and that resonated with me. I read her obituary yesterday, died at 49 of cardiac arrest and I just cried. What a shame. What a talent. What a human. It hit me harder than I would have expected.
Sault released five new albums yesterday. For download. For free. All at once. I have listened to three and a half so far. They are great. This band is great. Five albums at once. That is a lot. For free. This band, man. I thought their whole past stunt of releasing 9 and then deleting it after 99 days was a pretty good gimmick. All very Bill Drummond and the KLF. It all makes me a little sad, though, because I love these records and I can’t listen to them on streaming or in my car or anything, and I would like to listen to them more. This track “Valley of the Ocean” on Earth that I’m listening to right now is rad. These albums are rad. Sault are living their best lives.
A couple updates to previous editions:
Turns out on the Blanton’s letters, none of them are actually any more rare than the others, at least per this Reddit thread where some dude went to the Blanton’s factory and asked. You just think the one you don’t have is the rare one. Who knew. Well, I am still thankful to that bartender, it meant a lot.
Which leads me to my next update, the bar was named Lucky 13, I don’t know how I could have forgotten that. Thank you, Laura, for that reminder.
That bar was so great.
Taylor Swift is doing a tour next year, that is very exciting. She does not have a date planned for NC, that is very sad. There are some blank spaces (har har) on her itinerary around Atlanta, so we can hope. Emma pointed out that this was a big stadium tour and we don’t really have any big stadiums. So I Googled it! I Googled the capacity of every stadium on Taylor’s tour, the smallest one holds 61,000. And then I Googled the largest stadiums in North Carolina, and Emma is mostly right. There is only one stadium in the entire state that holds more than 61,000, and that is the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, which holds just over 75,000. It is where the Panthers play, which is confusing because I thought they were an SC team but what do I know about football. But in any case, it’s plenty big enough for Taylor to play in so come on Taylor, come to NC. Fun fact, Kenen-Flagler Stadium at UNC Chapel Hill, just up the road, is the third largest stadium in the state at 50,000. I know it’s a bit small for you Taylor but I think you should come and play Chapel Hill.
I then got a little confused, and thought of the Soderbergh film Logan Lucky, and wondered to myself, a) didn’t that take place in North Carolina? and b) doesn’t that venue hold a shit ton of people? And it turns out that yes, the venue in question is the Charlotte Motor Speedway, and it’s capacity is a stunning 97,000 to a just completely out of control 171,000 people depending on the configuration. The Charlotte Motor Speedway also hosts concerts, with the annual Carolina Rebellion festival hosting over 90,000 people. So come on, Taylor. Come to NC again! Your last NC show was great. Miranda Lambert showed up. I didn’t know who she was at the time but now I love The Marfa Tapes.
Yesterday was the effective launch date of a new law in New York City that requires employers such as ourselves to list on their job openings the salary range for them. We duly added the salary range to our opening positions, but it all makes me feel slightly weird because the way I hire is, in my opinion, completely rational and fair, but also just looks funny with this law. Like I just open up a generic position in a department, such as “account service professional’ or something like that, attempting to cast as wide a net as possible in this still very tight job market. Because, in the end, I want the most capable candidate at whatever experience level I can find them. This is sort of a common circumstance in small but growing companies, where you could hire a senior person or a junior person, because you just desperately need more people, and over time you’re going to fill out a whole department of 5 to 10 people, but right now you have three, and it really isn’t that important whether the next one is junior or senior. What’s important is that you get the best person. So as a consequence, our pay ranges on these jobs are extraordinarily large. This looks lazy, I think. And a large company would break it out and post separate job openings for a junior account executive, account director, senior account director, etc., with separate pay ranges but that makes me nervous because then it looks like we have three openings when, at the moment, we have only one opening. But I am also worried that these wide-band openings, so to speak, are going to give the wrong idea to someone who is in, say, the middle of the pack salary range. We pay fairly and well and are not really the target for what this law is trying to prevent, and I support it in general, to be clear. I am just not 100% sure what the best way to comply is that is not too labor intensive for our small team, misleading, and confusing for the candidates. I suspect I am overthinking this. Or am I? I don’t know!
Yesterday this new company was announced, a Mac software company called Rewind that is endeavoring to be a replacement for your memory on your Mac. The CEO posted a video on Twitter and did a little demo:
After watching it, it occurred to me that this new company is a perfect cypher for my current views on the tech industry. On the face of it, it is essentially Apple spotlight with a better UI. But in my current tech-paranoid mindset, my mind went to all sorts of dark places (Dr. Manhattan: “Your mind goes to dark places and you wonder why I keep the worst from you.):
“Okay this is like Spotlight but enhanced I guess that’s useful. I have so ingrained Spotlight’s limitations into my workflow with appropriate workarounds I don’t think I really need this.
“But c’mon man, don’t be an old fart, what if it makes something easier? Get with the program?”
“Nah. Also, they raised too much money. Also that money is from A16Z those guys are mostly evil these days. And now they probably have a valuation too high for the company to end up where it should, which is as acquired by Apple and incorporated as a built-in feature in OSX. They’re probably going to be a data play instead. Look how that subsequent tweet says they ‘record’ your data that is not promising.
“Spotify ‘records’ your data too they’re just making a new search index…
“Oh cool so now I have to have two search indexes of my data on my computer? Is this even on my computer or is it in the cloud are they taking my data?
“They say right here all the indexing happens on your machine…
“Oh so it’s going to be a bandwith hog…
“They say right here it’s minimal on Apple Silicon.
“‘Minimal’ is not zero. Also I don’t have Apple Silicon yet… Well, not on my main Mac. Apple Silicon is still too slow.”
And on and on.
It occurs to me it’s sort of like The Good Place when Ted Danson explains that the system is rigged, that the modern world is too complicated, that every act is laden with sin, that the simple act of buying a tomato will now accrue you bad points furthering your journey to hell. A decade — okay, maybe two — ago I would have thought this was so cool and signed up for the beta and installed it and probably even disabled Apple’s Spotlight (which, let’s face it, sucked for like a decade but also it’s pretty good now!) and really embraced it. But now? Now I’m like “eh. This is probably evil.”
Either I am getting old or everything is getting more evil.
That punk is either in love with that guy’s daughter or he has a newfound respect for life.
My final bit for today: Text a friend! Last night I was in a very good mood, having survived a Tuesday, and I really wanted to hear the song “1983” by the Incredible Moses Leroy. The thing about the Incredible Moses Leroy is that the album with 1983 on it is not on Spotify, or at least it hadn’t been for years. But now it was! My frind Adam got me into The Incredible Moses Leroy like twenty years ago, we both loved this album, and a couple years back, in the height of the lonely pandemic, we texted a bit about it and how great the record was and how sad it was that it was not on Spotify. So I texted him and told him the good news.
He basically told me he had no idea what I was talking about and I got the wrong guy. Which is probably true.
Also, the other day I had a long, involved dream where my friend Stephanie and her husband owned a giant, full-floor condo on the 73rd floor of a Manhattan highrise and they let me stay there as a boarder. I texted her this and told her that the whole thing went “about as well as you’d expect.”
She texted me back a single “hahaha.”
These may seem like underwhelming exchanges, but so what! Here, read this: Text Your Friends. It Matters More Than You Think. New research says most of us underestimate the power of the casual check-in.
Another friend recently did the same thing to me: texted me about her dream about me, a normal, run of the mill dream. IT IS THE BEST. IT IS THE BEST when friends text out of the blue even when the have nothing to say. We should all be saying hi a lot more.
Hi!
Shoegaze playlist for you, so much new shoegaze will I ever get to the bottom of the rabbit hole? Not today, young pedalist, not today. I don’t know a single thing about most of these bands, mos of them I have heard for the first time right here, except for Stargazer Lilies and THUS LOVE, which are a week or two into my repretoire. So many good band names so many good sqaulls of echoy feedback.
Okay have a lovely Wednesday I gotta go restart my computer because Apple’s file system and finder have elected to stop putting previews on image icons. Woo!