we moved out to the suburbs this week. still tidying up the old apartment, but we're sleeping at the new place.
im a bit surprised to find that i actually like a suburban home an awful lot
some time ago i took a medium dose of a tryptamine and among other things considered my relationship with work. one thing that I realized was that in fact I was holding myself back from some of the drudgery of the job for reasons of identity
i actually monologued about it to @selentelechia. something like:
"the thing is i think ive been approaching work and meetings and schedules and corporate life like im too cool for it. (pause) which. I am"
and nevertheless here i am living in a boring suburban house with a yard and owning a car and having a wife and a baby and actually paying attention to work and busting my ass every day
and it feels good actually
I spent some time turning this over as i drove to the store to get dinner for my wife and it was productive.
two points
1. there are several major periods in a person's life. some of them are biologically linked, others not. they are not of fixed duration. most are common but some are not.
examples from my life include infancy, adolescence, young adulthood, whatever im in now
the demands of life and desires of the heart are very different across these phases. a schoolboy wants very different things, and needs to be a different sort of person, than a breadwinner
2. letting ones desires and identity transition to accommodate the demands of a new phase is disorienting and possibly the most challenging part of a person's life, and stumbling may be the source of many hard lives.
I am imagining two main classes of failure modes here
the first failure mode is the obvious one of not letting oneself change. i had been stumbling about with this one without knowing it for a while by keeping work (which does actually matter) at arms length from what I imagined my life to be about
the second failure mode is swerving so hard into the new phase that one fails to integrate it with their past lives
this is subtler and I don't have any clean examples from fiction but I suspect its nevertheless a real problem
im imagining the damage from such a failure as the debris of broken relationships and a loss of personal meaning, of waking up at 45 and getting a divorce and a sports car and getting hair plugs and wondering what has happened with your life
I hate a lot of things about _American Beauty_ but maybe it does get this right
I dont know that I have any good advice about how to manage this apart from "this happens, and remember that scylla and charybdis bound these channels"
let your identity be flexible as your needs change I guess, while tending to things you care about to keep them continuous
israel is NOT an ally of america. theyre aggressively trying to capture our strategic ashkenazi resources. is that how an ally behaves?
a true America First policy would be ANTIZIONIST
jews dont belong in israel. they belong in new york and its time to come home
the eigenrobot administration is prepared to agree to a population swap of 100 american muslims repatriated to arabia for each israeli returned to us
im also prepared to accept a "Two State' solution wherein palestinians from gaza and the west bank will be resettled in michigan territory redesignated "new palestine" and expelled from the union. in exchange the US will accept all current Israeli territory as a new 50th state
but yes im sorry the credibility revolution was a mistake and economics has long since abandoned careful empirical work for atheoretical regression slop that it massively overinterprets to mindlessly support political claims
my advice to you is if you ever want to ruin a party full of applied econometricians talking about the effect of immigration on native employment, bring up the mariel boatlift after everyone is several drinks in
you may find result enlightening and you'll certainly have some fun
fun inside story
when seattle implemented a $15/hr minimum wage they asked some ppl at UW to do a study of the employment effects
the big paper dropped in 2017 and found huge disemployment effects
so the city immediately disavowed it and ran to amherst for a rebuttal
we can easily exploit this with secondary markets in H1B workers. all we need to do is buy up 63 H1Bs for a guaranteed successful IPO. vcs are leaving trillion dollar bills on the ground here
its a reasonable microeconomics paper with a plausible identification method and lots of regressions that are highly suggestive if you dont think about them too much
(are patents actually predictive of ipo success? are the h1bs producing these patents themselves? lol who knows)
the literature review provides some complementary evidence, some of which is interesting context and some of which flatly contradicts the claim tabarrok would like to make
This dynamic is _not_ obviously gainfully-modeled as IPD. Instead of acting simultaneously, one agent (here representing something like a D/R coalition) decides to act in each round.
Who acts next round is nondeterministic and may be affected by actions this round.
More things to consider in this model:
1. If party institutions are ahistorically weak, which I think they are now, discounting of future rounds ought to be treated as relatively intense, which makes commitment more difficult
the vital urge to say "ok, how is this wrong" starts to fade as you get older, because you've played that game so many times that it gets tiresome and you start to think you know what that room holds
usually you're right, but it's an easy way to get stuck
second issue is the cost of doing this sort of inquiry gets higher as you accumulate more committed beliefs or expectations
once more, you're usually more likely to be "correct" at any given moment, but updating gets very costly as your world model is built out and solidified
its been a long week so tonight please relax as i relate to you the tale of a great episode in american autism
our third president, thomas jefferson, was immensely autistic
he spent much of his time inventing questionably useful devices, getting hung up on and beefing over irrelevant abstractions, pursuing unwise relationships w subordinates, and recording data for no particular reason
he combined several of these hobbies in an extended incident in the court of france where he was serving as america's ambassador ("minister plenipotentiary") in the mid 1780s, succeeding a real scientist and charmer, benjamin franklin