Internet: Luxury or Utility?

The new Planet Money episode "Small America vs. Big Internet" brings up many of the typical free market vs. government themes that are prevalent in lobbying and politics in our great nation.

But the Covid pandemic really reframes this particular debate.

The City of Wilson was sick of not having fast internet, so they built their own network. They run it like a city utility . . . and it worked (not an easy task). When the big telecom got wind of Wilson's success, they sent a horde of lobbyists to North Carolina to nip this in the bud. The telecom companies have been doing this on a state by state basis, and twenty states now have laws prohibiting cities from creating their own internet infrastructure.

These "level playing field" bills are pushed by telecom lobbyists in the name of free-market competition. But small towns lose out because sometimes it's not financially worth providing fast internet for them.

The question is this: how does the pandemic reframe this dilemma?

Is fast internet a luxury or a utility?

If public schools continue to use the internet for remote learning, then I think there needs to be a shift in the legislation. Fast broadband is vital to kids being educated. If towns want to provide this-- and they can pull it off-- then they should be allowed to do so.

Wilson has been grandfathered, and they are still providing inexpensive fast internet for their residents. But they are not allowed to expand. They should be a model for the nation-- the internet is more like water and electricity and public schools than it is like cable TV.

I'm sure the Trump team is on this.

You Can't Go Wrong with Josephine Tey

Another week of life during COVID, another mystery novel down the hatch . . . 

Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise-- the 4th installment featuring the calm, cool, collected, oft-times confused, always curious, and super-classy Inspector Grant-- might be better as a literary novel than as a mystery. The mystery resolves fast and furious in the final pages, but the real fun is touring the weird little English countryside village of Salcott St. Mary with Inspector Grant. The town was once full of farmers and craftsmen but is now regrettably invaded by London artists. They seek the lovely scenery of the town, which sits on the banks of the Rushmere river. 

Reminds me of Wellfleet, a similar town of locals and artists, which sits on the upper arm of Cape Cod.

When you read Josephine Tey, you'll need to look up words like "manqué" and "farouche" but you'll be treated to quick bits of characterization like this:

What made a man a bounder was a quality of mind. A crassness. A lack of sensitivity. It was something that was quite incurable; a spiritual astigmatism.

You also get a detective who is familiar with high art and culture, and thus makes allusions instead of terse, hard-boiled pronouncements . . .

But Walter pinned his worm on to a Shakespearean hook and angled gently with it, so that his listeners saw the seething legions of blind purpose turning the grey rock in the western sea into the green Paradise . . .

Tey herself is something of a social commentator:

And walking has lost face since it became universal in the form of an activity called hiking.

Inspector Grant is no Sherlock Holmes. He thinks hard about the case, runs through the possibilities, and makes his befuddlement apparent to the reader. He struggles for any kind of epiphany and lets you in on that struggle. I really like this about him. I can enjoy the scenery and the people, and then-- once in a while-- he lays out what I've missed.

The possibilities are: one, that he fell into the water accidentally and was drowned; two, that he was murdered and thrown in the river; three, that he walked away for reasons of his own; four, that he wandered away because he forgot who he was and where he was going; five, that he was kidnapped.

Inspector Grant does not completely discount the London artists, just because they aren't gritty and local. Take his friend Marta Hallard, the actress-- who he describes thusly:

He looked across at her, elegant and handsome in the firelight, and thought of all the different parts that he had seen her play: courtesans and frustrated hags, careerists and domestic doormats. It was true that actors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normal people lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little to do with education. In general knowledge Marta was as deficient as a not very bright child of eleven; her attention automatically slid off anything that was alien to her own immediate interests and the result was an almost infantine ignorance. He had seen the same thing in hospital nurses, and sometimes in overworked G.P.s. But put a script in her hands, and from a secret and native store of knowledge she drew the wherewithal to build her characterization of the author's creation.

She has one of the most telling takes on how to find the murderer. 

Well, I take it you commit murder because you are one-idead. Or have become one-idead. As long as you have a variety of interests you can't care about any one of them to the point of murder. It is when you have all your eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that you lose your sense of proportion.

If you're looking for some sharp and entertaining prose couched within a highly entertaining mystery story, I highly recommend this enigmatic Scottish lady. Her real name is Elizabeth MacKintosh and she wrote plays as Gordon Daviot, but it's when she embodies her Golden Age detective-style as Josephine Tey that something special happens.

Conservatives and Liberals Enjoy the Dog Park (and confusing Dave)

Saturday morning at the dog park, I talked to a professed conservative about the Covid pandemic . . . he was optimistic about the numbers and he seemed like an intelligent, rational business guy (he was willing to admit that he thinks Trump is insane and has handled things poorly . ..  he said he would have voted for Bloomberg for president-- which means he's not voting for Biden, I suppose).

Anyway, he had crunched the data and he was sure the virus was going to subside when the warm weather comes. 

We did not wear masks while we chatted. 

Sunday morning at the dog park, it was the usual group. Liberals. Lawyers, teachers, lesbians, etc. They were all wearing masks, so I put my mask on.

They don't think the warm weather theory holds water. They cited Brazil and Ecuador as counter-examples.

They are also worried about droplets in the air when it's humid. They are worried about crowded beaches, crowded stores, Wal-Mart, the fact that people of color are suffering more from the pandemic. They are worried about wealth inequality being amplified and the fact that the investor class isn't really feeling this because the stock market is propped up by the fed. 

They think Florida is suppressing the Covid numbers.

The teacher said she didn't think meat-space school would start until January.

I don't know what to think.

New Jersey Starts to Open . . . Is This a Good Thing? Too Many Numbers to Know For Sure . . .

Outdoor stuff in New Jersey is starting to open.

My wife is down at the community garden today, handing out keys and helping people to reestablish control over their wild-grown plots.

I played tennis with a buddy at the park by my house yesterday.

The dog park is open!

This is great for me. I've gone from interacting with hundreds of people a week to the usual quarantine family-time and Zoom happy hours. The lack of stimulus is making me a little crazy (although I've been passing the time with low-stakes online poker. I'm reading some books and learning some math . . . but I don't think I'm headed to the WSOP any time soon).

The dog park at least restores some random social interactions, for both me and Lola.

This morning, I got to talk to a smart guy from down the street. He's in finance and owns a HUGE house. He's a conservative but thinks Trump is a lunatic. He would have voted for Bloomberg. He thinks the free market economy is rigged against the environment but doesn't like liberal foreign policy. He's the kind of conservative that that-- if you're in a left-wing echo chamber-- you might not think exists (now, of course, he lives in Highland Park . . . which is the most liberal town in a liberal county, so that skews things).

He's a hedge-fund data scientist and he's sanguine about the numbers-- which is a nice change. He says if you look at the data, you really need three things for the pandemic to continue.

1) an elderly population

2) densely populated areas

3) cold weather

You can read all day about #3, but it seems that warmer weather will at least slow the spread of the virus (but this won't prevent it from returning in the winter). And it's getting warm and yucky in New Jersey (in fact, I've got the AC on right now . . . when my wife gets home she's going to yell at me, but it's 73 in the house and humid. That's gross).

I presented the conservative-data-guy the statistics rattling around in my mind:

For every 800 people in New Jersey, one of them has died from Covid-19.

Two percent of the state has tested positive for the virus.

We're still generating over 100 deaths and over 1500 cases a day.

He told me something I know: the vast majority of the people that died were in nursing homes. That doesn't make it right, but it could have been prevented. Old people really can't handle this thing. There does seem to be some long-lasting effects in younger people, but we're probably going to build herd immunity in New Jersey and New York (at a great cost, but the genie is out of the bottle).

He's rooting for herd immunity. It's going to be a long road. I got my antibody test this week-- I'm still waiting for results. The doctor said about 20 percent of people being tested came up positive for antibodies. I think I had it February, but my wife was negative for antibodies. And the doctor said the two things she's hearing most from people testing positive for antibodies are:

1) two weeks

2) it felt like the worst X ever . . . the variable being flu, bronchitis, cold, strep, cough, etc.

My thing in February wasn't the worst thing ever (although giving blood for the test WAS the worst thing ever . . . I was really nervous -- my blood pressure was higher than normal-- and maybe a little dehydrated because I went running. The lady had to do both arms-- she didn't get enough blood out of the first arm. I wanted to give up and leave . . . I didn't like being in a room with multiple people giving blood . . . wounds don't bother me but when blood is circulating through tubes and needles, I get light-headed).

We agreed on a few things. Other countries did a better job.

Taiwan, for instance, had 440 cases and 7 deaths. Part of this might have been the heat, but it's mainly through comprehensive testing and contact tracing.

Our President has failed us on the testing, the tracing, and the plan. This conservative totally agreed with that. Trump, like Putin and Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, is too macho to deal with something as small and statistical as a virus.

And Americans aren't big on mandatory tracking, testing, and tracing. Our freedoms don't mesh with fighting a virus. So we aren't out of the woods yet.

The attitude of the day is guarded optimism-- for now-- but unfortunately, winter is coming.

Quarantine Partying: The Wreckage

At 6:15 AM this morning, when I sat down at the computer to begin putting up assignments for my students, this is the image that greeted me:

And upon further inspection, it was exactly as I had imagined.

I was tempted to wake my children up and confront them with the evidence of their iniquity, but -- for once-- I avoided melodrama and remembered my phone had a camera. I could show them later, when they were fully rested and might respond more appropriately. I didn't need another melee like yesterday . . . when the two of them got into a fistfight over a phone charger and I lost my shit.

And it wasn't all that bad: this decadently slam-dunked empty pudding container was the only remnant of their quarantine recreation; it happened last night while they were playing Magic: The Gathering with some friends on the computer in the kitchen. We're lucky to have so many devices.

I went down to my study and checked to see if I was a hypocrite. Not so much. The only remnant of Tuesday Night Corona Poker was an empty glass . . . a glass that was once half full of seltzer and tequila. 

This brought back hard memories. For the majority of last night, I was seeing the glass half-full, making hands, bluffing wisely, scaring people out of pots, stealing blinds . . . I was optimistic as hell. How could I lose? It was down to Stacey and me, I was up 8000 chips to Stacey's mere 780, and the blinds were getting big. I knew she was the better player . . . the more experienced player, but not tonight. Tonight was my night to shine. I was pushing her around, knocking her out of everything, and then she doubled up on a weird draw. And then she did it again. I had a huge hand but she drew four diamonds in a row to make a basement door flush. Then she went back down, and then she drew again and again and again. Against solid calls (although I could have been more patient . . . if I had been patient, she would have gotten blinded out). And then it was suddenly over. My glass was half empty. And I didn't put a coaster under it. 

A Norwegian, an Australian aborigine, and a clown walk into a bar . . .

If you're looking for a crime thriller with a double layer of exotic unfamiliarity, check out Jo Nesbø's first Harry Hole novel The Bat.

Nesbø is a Norwegian author, but he has Harry Hole travel to Australia to investigate a murder. So you see the country as both a tourist and a detective. Harry's "tour guide" from the Sydney police force is Andrew Kensington-- an aborigine-- so that adds another layer of alienation to the narrative. Throw in Sydney's wild gay scene, a salacious circus, a dismembered cross-dressing clown, rednecks in the outback, the illegal drug trade, dangerous creatures, indigenous mythology, Northern Europeans in a faraway land, a serial killer and you've got quite a vivid collage.

On the one hand, Harry Hole is the classic detective with a tortured past . . . but in this first Hole novel, Nesbø revises this trope, and Hole becomes a detective with a tortured present. He falls off the wagon during the investigation-- and you'll learn why that is NOT a good thing-- and he has to confront his past and dark and ugly ways.

Ten box jellyfish out of ten.

Dave is in the Shit

The last thing of note that happened to me was this:

Saturday morning, when I was bending over to scoop and bag my dog's poop, a bird shit on my head. Bird crap splattered all over my headphones and my hat.

I was dealing with shit from above and below.

This week, instead of getting shit on, I'm going to get some shit done. My van needs fixin', the dog needs to go to the vet, I need to get an antibody test, and I'd like to close an account at the Credit Union.

I'll tally up my getting-shit-done-rate at the end of the week.

If You're Getting Bored of Your Pandemic Work-outs, Try This One . . .

It took two tries for me to complete this video. I still can't successfully do all of the exercises, but I'm close.

The instructor is uninspirational and emotionless, but she's really cute and has perfect form.

I listened to a podcast during my second (and successful) attempt. The podcast combated the monotony (although many people feel podcasts ARE monotonous . . . including and Rick and Morty . . . but not Summer).

The first time I tried, I made it 22 minutes out of the half-hour and then collapsed, full of shame. But today I conquered all thirty minutes. I'm strong like a 110-pound girl!

Quarantine Day One Million

Starting to lose the thread . . . but here are some thoughts anyway.

I waited in line the other day to get into Trader Joe's . . . the line was really long. It went beyond Bed Bath and Beyond. But the line moved quickly because it wasn't very dense. The lady in front of me was bad at approximating distances. She was keeping a good six or seven yards behind the next person.

There was a cheerful guy spraying carts with something. But then you get inside and it's the normal madness. There were arrows on the floor which I found it impossible to follow. The aisles and small and everyone is on top of each other. I squeeze and fondle every piece of produce before I select it. The whole setup reminded me of beefed-up airline security after 9/11. It might make you feel safer, but deep down you know it's not doing shit. 

I finished Donna Tartt's The Secret History. It's not quite as epic as The Goldfinch but it's faster-paced and-- if you went to college in the 80s or 90s-- required reading. It's the R-rated version of Dead Poet's Society.  

In financial news, my son Alex built a computer bot so he could buy a Supreme product drop. A leopard skin cap. It was seventy bucks. He split the price with his brother, and they are going to resell it for a profit (so they believe). I will keep you posted on this outlay.

My wife said a strange thing the other day when she was trying to laze about on the couch and watch baking shows. She said, "I want to lie like broccoli." She claimed this line was from a movie. I thought she was mixing up idioms again. 

But I was wrong.

Parallel Madness!

This episode of The Indicator informed me of an Amazon Prime show called Counterpart in which there's a world parallel to ours in which life is lived in the shadow of a deadly flu outbreak. Apparently, the post-pandemic world in the show looks "disturbingly similar" to the world many of us are living in now.

The show stars the inimitable J.K. Simmons, so I might check it out.

Then there's there are the murder hornets. An invasive bug from China that manifests itself in Washington State and starts to move across the United States, wreaking havoc on the European honey bees that have not evolved evolutionary immunity to the creatures.

Parallel madness.

Years ago, I pitched a show to Netflix set in an alternate reality. 

Donald Trump runs for President and Russian hackers employ social media algorithms to make it so. Then "President Trump" has to deal with a deadly zoonotic virus that invades our great nation. It comes from the far reaches of China-- from a bat or pangolin-- and Trump and his incompetent federal government have to deal with the medical and financial crisis. 

Chaos ensues!

It's a satire, of course, but Netflix didn't get it. They said it was absurd, and not in a hip, surreal way. More in a sad and stupid way. 

Dave's Community Service Finally Pays Off!

Once again this morning, I did my community service shopping and delivery for my old dude. Pineapple chunks, Italian Wedding soup, chicken franks, bananas, apple sauce, two-liter diet lemon/lime soda, etc. I'm getting pretty good at his list. As I loaded the bags into the car, it started to drizzle.

When I pulled into the apartment driveway, there was something new. A cute blonde woman-- wearing lasses and probably in her late twenties- sat in the trunk space of her Subaru. She was working on a computer, using the hatchback as an umbrella. I had seen her briefly in the apartment once before. I asked her if she was related to my old dude and she said, "No, just a roommate. Apparently, there are a couple of small apartments on the top floor." Then she complimented me on my good deed and we talked for a good thirty minutes. She once was an elementary teacher in Arkansas and now she's on a research grant at Rutgers. She was in the midst of collecting data from schools in Brooklyn when the virus hit. Now she's busy finishing up her research and applying for new grants. We talked a lot about how school might look in the future, the way this pandemic will pull back the curtain on income inequality and its effect on education, prom, graduation, my wife trying to teach math to elementary students remotely . . . all sorts of topics.

I think she found me charming and funny, though I was dressed like a homeless person and I haven't shaved in a while. And we were far enough apart that she couldn't smell my morning coffee breath, which wasn't particularly pleasant (I know this because I was wearing a mask in the Stop&Shop, which amplifies and exacerbates coffee breath). This is the kind of credit you should get when you do community service-- I think this would make a great commercial for the program, a guy drops off he groceries for an old dude and then gets to chat with a cute, intelligent chick. 

I'm sure she will tell her cute graduate school friends about me, and they will all be there next Friday to laud my good deeds.

Is the Stock Market Fake News? Is Your Consciousness Fake News? Who Knows?

Planet Money Episode 995: Buybacks And Bailouts is a winner. The podcast dissects the viral debate between CNBC anchor Scott Wapner and billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya. The Canadian venture capitalist believes that the U.S. federal government should let the airlines fail and not be particularly concerned if hedge fund investors lose their vacation homes in the Hamptons.

What follows is his logic.

Over the past decade, large businesses have made enormous profits. With those profits, you have two choices:

1) You can use the money to improve the company itself. You can pay employees more. You can invest in R&D. You can save a pile of cash for emergencies.

2) You can give the money to investors, making the stock more valuable. You can do this with dividends, or the more recent financial engineering miracle . . . stock buybacks. You take your profits and buy lots of company stock. Then you make that stock disappear, increasing the value of the remaining stock.

Obviously, you can also balance the two, but Palihapitiya believes that great companies do more of number one. They are visionary and look to the future.

The airlines did a lot of number two. So did many companies in the S&P 500. According to Palihapitiya:

Since 2009, the 500 companies in the S&P 500 - so these are the 500 best companies in the world - they bought back $7 trillion of stock and/or issued dividends. OK? That turned out to be more than 90 cents of every single dollar of profit that they made over the last 11-plus years.

So why bail these companies out? They haven't looked to the future. Mainly, they've made the rich richer. Palihapitiya thinks it is abominable that only five cents of every dollar in the stimulus package has been handed to individual Americans.

Now, the stimulus money will find its way to some individual Americans; those that have money invested in the stock market. Because the money will serve to prop up the market and prop up stocks in companies that executed buybacks. So the rich will get richer. And folks not heavily invested won't see much money.

I can see both sides. I want my retirement savings to stay solvent. I want my pension to exist. But I know I'm one of the lucky folks, even if I'm not a billionaire. There's plenty of people who don't own stocks, don't have retirement money saved, and don't have a pension. They need cash. They may not get it . . . or get much. Meanwhile, big businesses will.

Here is a piece of the video. Definitely listen to the podcast first.




In other podcast news, somewhere in the middle of this conversation between Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari, they explain why I bought Donna Tartt's The Secret History on Amazon the other day. Harari claims that the AI algorithms used by Google and Amazon and Facebook would have known he was gay years before he discovered this. Amazon knew I would buy Tartt's novel for $1.99 . . . a great deal! They knew better than me what I wanted. Now I'm happy reading it, though I would have never remembered about it with AI assistance.

Is this a good thing?

Who fucking knows. The same goes for the bailout.

The Usual Quarantine Stuff

Last night was Zoom pub night. Again.

Earlier Thursday, it was more TV. So much TV. I watched some Bosch with the wife, The Expanse with the kids, and The Wire with the wife and kids. I tried my best to watch some of the Parks and Rec reunion but found it awkward and sluggish. Headed back to Zoom pub night (which is also awkward and sluggish, I think that's just what Zoom is like).

I woke up at 4:45 AM this morning. Decided to get up and get some grading done. Waded through a bunch of narratives and some other assignments. Then went back to bed. That's a plus about remote learning: you can work on your own schedule.

Zoom meeting with the English Department at 8:30 AM.

Then I did some community service and went shopping for an old guy. Bought the usual stuff: liverwurst, ham turkey, pineapple chunks, soup soup soup, grapes, applesauce, etc. Old person food. I'm getting quicker in the store. Listening to electronica helps (Amon Tobin and Boards of Canada).

When I dropped the food off, a cute lady finally witnessed my community service! She answered the door. She was either a relative or some sort of aid. It's nice when someone cute sees you doing community service, but-- unfortunately-- I was dressed like a homeless person.

Note to self: if you wear a mask and you forgot to brush your teeth, you're going to smell some bad breath. Your own bad breath. And there's no way to escape it.

Ian and I did our usual three-mile run. It started pouring rain ten minutes in and didn't stop until we got home. Huge drops. Now it's warm and sunny. Springlike.

Ian stumbled on a fawn while walking the dog.

I just finished my second Josephine Tey mystery: a Shilling For Candles. She's a great writer. Weird characters, a run-of-the-mill detective without the tortured past, and a great ear for dialogue.

Here is a sample passage, summarizing the information the police received about possible sightings of an alleged murder suspect on the run:

By Tuesday noon Tisdall had been seen in almost every corner of England and Wales, and by tea-time was beginning to be seen in Scotland. He had been observed fishing from a bridge over a Yorkshire stream and had pulled his hat suspiciously over his face when the informant had approached. He had been seen walking out of a cinema in Aberystwyth. He had rented a room in Lincoln and had left without paying. (He had quite often left without paying, Grant noticed.) He had asked to be taken on a boat at Lowestoft. (He had also asked to be taken on a boat at half a dozen other places. The number of young men who could not pay their landladies and who wanted to leave the country was distressing.) He was found dead on a moor near Penrith. (That occupied Grant the best part of the afternoon.) He was found intoxicated in a London alley. He had bought a hat in Hythe, Grantham, Lewes, Tonbridge, Dorchester, Ashford, Luton, Aylesbury, Leicester, Chatham, East Grinstead, and in four London shops. He had also bought a packet of safety-pins pins in Swan and Edgars. He had eaten a crab sandwich at a quick lunch counter in Argyll Street, two rolls and coffee in a Hastings bun shop, and bread and cheese in a Haywards’ Heath inn. He had stolen every imaginable kind of article in every imaginable kind of place—including a decanter from a glass-and-china warehouse in Croydon. When asked what he supposed Tisdall wanted a decanter for, the informant said that it was a grand weapon.

And here is my favorite line from the book:

It is said that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram reading: All is discovered: fly, will snatch a toothbrush and make for the garage.

It's interesting what people lose themselves in during quarantine. Some people are watching old sports. My buddy Whitney is mainlining music documentaries. All I want is crime stuff. The chase scenes, the investigation, the freedom of movement, the bars and dives, and the various localities pull my mind from the reality of quarantine confinement.