Lifelong Criminality That Otherwise Would Never Have Come to Light

Looks like I got this one right, almost a year and a half ago:

Trump Threatens iPhone Tariffs

I've been repeatedly stressing my worry about existential danger to Apple in the event that China really puts the screws to them.

Tariffs aren't a major long term concern, and they don't terrify investors much, either. Apple's stock is edging upward in spite of Cheetoh Jesus spouting some ignorant nonsense about how a tariff on iPhones would be a not-bad thing.

The Chinese could kick Apple out of China (e.g. if they consider them competition to some state-owned technology), or create conditions where Apple has no choice to pull out. They could devise all sorts of horrors, and that's my worry. Tariffs - from either side - would be a drag, and might mean waiting for a new president before I can recoup my investment. But it wouldn't panic me.

China really putting the screws to Apple would be very, very bad. And so far I don't see that on the horizon, knock aluminum alloy.


Much more amusingly: Dad Photoshops Daughter Into Dangerous Situations To Freak Out Relatives

Once the Con is Gone

GM Lordstown reportedly closing with loss of 2,500 jobs. @realDonaldTrump told the Mahoning Valley last year: The area's jobs "are all coming back. They’re all coming back. ... We’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build new ones." https://t.co/TLCh1uchFU

— Randy Ludlow (@RandyLudlow) November 26, 2018

When the MAGA diehards finally acknowledge the con, there will be no redemption. They will still hate Democrats just as much, while plunging into a deep cynicism leaving them still more vulnerable to demagoguery and extremism. There will be conciliation among moderates, but extremists gonna extreme.

Want to empathize just a bit? Consider: did you buy into Snowden/Assange when they first arose? Have you since realized their thing was hooey? Are you now recognizing that our intelligence community is professional, not totalitarian, and are you rooting for them to save us from this predicament? Do you recognize yet that Snowden/Assange were active measures in the same operation that brought us this horrific mess?

If no, give it another year (and a thorough digestion of Mueller's report, if it sees light of day), you'll get there. But if so, ask yourself: how embarrassed are you about having been caught up in all that? How publicly confessional? How much have you "hugged it out" with the squares who branded Snowden a traitor and Assange a jackal back in the day? Will they experience your redemption?


Never Count on Redemption

Swooping Home From Detroit

Since earliest childhood, I've had an utter fascination with high-speed travel. Scramjets (10x faster than current aircraft; NYC to Sydney in two hours!), vacuum tubes, maglevs, bullet trains, and the whole beautiful gamut of clever schemes for interstellar travel; I can dive into this stuff all day, completely absorbed.

It's not about speed, per se. I do drive fast, and would have probably enjoyed being a race car driver. But it's not the pure velocity that appeals to me, so much as the notion of fast transit. I was easily bored as a kid, and car trips felt endless (my father had the habit of driving the final few miles home from a long car trip with regal languor - I nearly stroke out just remembering it). Planes and trains were similarly pokey for my taste. It seemed somehow wrong - almost insultingly so - that conveyance was so earthwormly slow.

I've had a recurrent dream since early childhood where I'm zooming cross-country. It's not clear if I'm on the ground or in the air, but I'm tearing through states like nothing.

Wow. I just remembered where this came from! It was the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs tunnels across a map of the United States, ends up in the wrong destination, and remarks "I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque!" Something about this macro view of travel really appealed to me. I wanted it!

So in my dream, I chew up prodigious map distances, gracefully segueing from region to region, executing macro turns to go south (Florida!) or north (Canada!). I'm like Bugs on the map.

Only once have I actually managed this in real life. Driving home from Detroit once, I actually had the sensation of swooping from Detroit to New York.

Let me explain. Virtually no one has ever driven from NYC to Boston. We drive from NYC to the Bronx, and from the Bronx into Westchester, from there into Connecticut, then through a boring patch, possibly involving bathrooms and food. Then we drive to Sturbridge Mass to get on the Mass Pike. From there we might glide into Boston in more or less one swoop. But the drive, overall, is six drives, minimum, and more often 60 or 600. I defy you to get in a car in NYC and simply drive to Boston. You can't do it. You will lose the flow. It will fragment.

But one time I managed to actually drive home from Detroit. There were two major highway interchanges, and I watched myself execute them on a very large mental map. A left at Toledo and a right at Cleveland. I never lost the big picture - the swoop - of it. Particularly one-pointed was the portion from Eastern Pennsylvania to New York, which played out like gliding through a vast tunnel - or like a marathon's final mile with the stadium distantly in view. The drive was one of my proudest accomplishments.

I will, alas, not live to travel through a suboceanic tube from the East Coast to Europe at 5000 mph. Nor will I travel on a generational light sail vessel to Alpha Centauri. These will be my sole dying regrets (however I will, I think, get to go to bed in a self-driving camper and wake up in front of a carefully chosen diner in Maine when I'm old and otherwise unable to manage such an odyssey). But at least I did once swoop home from Detroit.


P.S. - There is a Maglev train connecting Shanghai Airport with the city. It completes the 19 mile journey in 7.5 minutes (!!), topping out at 268 mph. This makes Shanghai airport layovers a very interesting prospect! (The big question is whether there's anything good to eat near Longyang Road Station - the maglev's terminus - or if one must board the metro.)

P.P.S. - If that Bugs Bunny episode had an effect on you, too, then I invite you to witness the following. A good deal of my adult neurotic fear and dread traces directly back to the "Child Catcher" scene from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which I didn't consciously remember until recently stumbling across it:

pic.twitter.com/fgWXfA9XZm

Another Bite of AAPL

I bought a bunch more Apple stock at $172, following my previous buy at $192. I've kept some cash on hand to buy still more in case it sinks further, but I'll be very happy with a 33% profit once it recovers to its previous high - or more as it shoots even higher (every lengthy dip in Apple's history has been followed by a new high - though I know I can't count on that happening forever, so I sell incrementally as the stock snaps back).

If it takes a year or more to recover, yippee. That means I'll pay low long-term capital gains taxes.


If China attacks Apple as part of the trade war (which no one is currently predicting), I may not get that profit after all, but I doubt I'd incur much loss.

Downshifting to Accelerate

This year the Slog turned ten years old. A writer friend had warned me early on that I'd quickly run out of things to write about. For some reason, that hasn't been a problem.


At the time I launched Chowhound, I was a "hot" writer. I'd just published my first book, which was very well reviewed, and was starting to get busy as a freelancer after several years as a cult figure. After a thoroughly deflating job offer from the Daily News (story here), I decided to chuck it all and went to ground with a flaky web community. I was abandoning my shot at The Big Time - it felt like a stabbing wound - but it seemed right to go small-time, so I stuck with it. I'm assuming most of you have read the tale of how it turned out, so you know it wasn't entirely a success story from my perspective, but one thing's for sure: it wasn't small-time.

Upon finally leaving Chowhound, no one remembered I'd ever been a writer. I was treated brusquely by a succession of editors and publishers I approached (one old contact, having reached a lofty position, asked me how my trombone playing had been going), and, once again, I went to ground, this time with a blog...er, Slog. There would be no small-time/big-time inversion, however. While web sites were sexy in 1997 (I reluctantly admit that Chowhound's success had more to do with the currency of its platform than the merits of my vision), blogs definitely were not circa 2008. Also, by writing about a very broad sweep of topics - and not pre-masticating every thought - I ensured there'd be something to repel every reader. As I'd rued very early on (in fact - ha! - it was only one month after the Slog's launch), narrowed scope is essential for building a crowd.

So this never blew up. In the long view, it's been a shaggy dog story where I kept upping my game out of gleeful curiosity to discover whether there was any level of insight great enough to procure wider attention. Eventually I looked back and realized I'd brewed up a theology, a cosmology, a slew of successful predictions and several hundred original insights.

Links to this Slog could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the average post is read by a few dozen souls, so in that sense it's been a failure (not that I'm not pleased to have you!). But I would never have generated those ideas and insights if I'd tried to publish all my material in magazines, web sites, and books, under the uncomprehending gaze of haughty media gatekeepers. I wouldn't know even a fraction of what I've uncovered here, at least not in any conscious, articulated way. 

Twice I've ripped my attention away from The Big Time to take a painfully amateurish diversion with surprising results. Having tolerated the stabbing sensation of those extreme downshifts, and applied my ant-like work ethic, I was twice rewarded with the sight of something unexpectedly ambitious heaving itself into existence. As if by magic.


See "The Inside Story on Asceticism" and "Deprivation" for more on deliberately cutting back growth to stimulate fuller foliage.

Why American Biz Rejects Chowhoundishness

Me: Why is there no super-competent wine bar in the Finger Lakes, where you can go try glasses of the best stuff, without needing to trek around to far-flung tasting rooms?

Local Wine Expert Friend: The best-selling Fingerlakes wine is Haslitt Red Cat, which is sweet hybrid swill. It would take a leap of faith for someone to open a top-notch wine bar.


He's right, and, unfortunately, this sort of thinking is seen everywhere. I first noticed it back in high school, when I went to the beach with friends who had good taste in music but chose to blast awful pop on the portable radio because “girls don’t like Frank Zappa”. We could have tractor-beamed every cool Zappa-loving girl on the beach and enjoyed an awesome summer, but instead we drew marginal bored attention from boring normals (while afflicting ourselves). It made not a bit of sense to me. Why aim for every single girl? We're smarter than orangutans!

It drives me crazy to see this thinking in nearly all business markets. It's tautological: they proffer only crap, because low-quality's the norm. I.e. they give consumers what they want, and what consumers want is what they give them. To me, it seems obvious that while 80% will indeed gladly accept crap, the 20% who care about quality - not just richy-rich snobs, but any folks who eschew the most well-trodden consumer pathways - also constitute a worthy (and scalable) market.

No. American business - even small business - usually ignores that 20%. One doesn’t need 80% of a town's population as patrons; 20% would do nicely. Yet most everyone chases the 80%, and this is why quality is so lumpy and chowhounding, even at this late date, still feels so against-the-grain.

I certainly understand why most aim for the 80%. But given that capitalism abhors a vacuum, I can't understand why the opportunity created by this neglect is so seldom pursued. Three hypotheses, none of them hopeful:

1. Statistical naiveté (i.e. "80% is more than 20%, and who doesn't want 'more'?").

2. It's harder to traffic in quality...and harder to please the intrinsically hard-to-please. You must really know your stuff, and keep up. You can't just blithely phone in an order for X pallets of commoditized widgets, ala The Sims. When "the product" is more than a bland variable, business complexity is substantially increased.

3. The notion that "better" might be preferred on the merits, rather than via luxury cache, is relatively new, and capitalism, which is far more laggy than Adam Smith anticipated, has not yet processed this new norm. For example, Danny Meyer's 1985 brainstorm of opening an everyday-ish cafe that happened to be way better quality than usual - and the success which ensued for Union Square Cafe - still has not been fully absorbed by the restaurant industry (or even by Meyer himself).

Monster Tots and Angels

I had the awful luck on my shatteringly early flight home from Spain to find myself seated in front of a babbling toddler. While he kept up his ceaseless patter, I assumed my pained traveler facial expression, pinching the bridge of my nose. Oh, man.

We've all been there, including the inevitable part where he curiously pitched forward to explore the crack between the seats in front of him - i.e. the space just behind my skull - where he began singing some incoherent toddler song right in my ear, the grubby little monster.

As I began to whimsically consider the murderous potential of the various objects in my backpack, I paused to consider whether I might be overreacting. There'd been no screaming or crying. No kicking of seatbacks. And his song was actually oddly soothing. In fact, I was surprised to find my eyes tearing up a little, and my muscles relaxing.

A few minutes before, I'd passed through the airport where many years ago the comely manager of security - whose name I never knew - and I had fallen in love while she dashed me through the obstacle course moments before my flight's push-back (I briefly told the tale here). She shepherded me through the gate, I stepped into the plane, the door began to be shut, and we both peered back in synchronized startled recognition. Please find your seat, sir.

It takes a lot to make me peer at my life through drama glasses - to shift to the cinematic view of it all, or to dwell upon the absent. But this stretch of BCN's airport corridor is a perennially tricky traverse, one of my few enduring raw spots. I was still shaky as I boarded the plane and took my seat.

But then a soothing song was sung to me, so intimately, by the clichéd monster tot from the row behind.


I guess this is pretty much the archetypal Slog posting. Trace the evolution of the perspective here. Or consider this. And note that this is 100% perceptual framing all around.

Most importantly: this would be an especially good moment to reread this posting about angels.

The Unintended Consequences Of Health Apps

So while you were freezing your asses off, I was strolling the sunny streets of Barcelona, another of my cheap travel deals.

Hello, my beauties:

It was 60 degrees there, and the locals, dressed in parkas, gaped at me like a crazy man for walking around in a t-shirt (I explained to a few that I was there to “warm up”, which only confirmed suspicions).

So I spent a lot of time enjoying the weather. Seeing as how I'm the last person on earth to have realized that iPhones track your walking, I’ve been getting a kick out of this feature for the past few months. And, wow, check this out:

I knew that I walk a lot while traveling, but I’d figured it was more like 2 or 3 miles/day. Given that I was burning the bejesus out of my calories, I scarcely felt compelled to refuse extra slices of fried potato omelet. And so my 100% extra exercise was negated by 125% extra eating, and I gained a couple of pounds.

Without this super-helpful health-forward app, I’d have eaten much more normally.


OTOH, my metabolism really juiced up. I came back with fingernails like claws. Lots of activity and plenty of well-distributed eating seem to be the way out of metabolic syndrome (the unhealthy state of a body that believes it's starving and has hunkered down into calorie conservation mode), though it's best if that eating is well-balanced re: protein/carb/fat, and sticks to lean protein, healthy fat, and complex carbs.

What Aging Is

Ah, okay. I get it now. I see what Aging is.

Back when people got old in their 60s and were largely immobile and drooling by age 70, it made sense to start falling apart circa age 55. We were gradually shown that things were winding down. It was a kindness; a gentle pivot to denouement.

Like the music on Final Jeopardy, or the orchestra swelling during an Oscar acceptance speech, we were told to start wrapping things up. Nothing extreme! Vision gets blurry, hearing gets scratchy, everything hurts a little, and recovery becomes a slog. Body parts become more like inanimate objects - less able to self-repair, they carry the cumulative damage of every minor indignity.

Having offered due notice, god (or whatever) avoids liability. It's not like you didn't have ample fair warning!

But in an era when most of us expect to live past our mid 80s, these middle-age warning shots no longer serve their intended purpose. Instead, they augur an entirely gratuitous headwind; a snide reminder that the impending three decades will be spent battling obsolete artifacts of diminishment.

I'm not bitter. I accept. It sure beats the alternative! But I hadn’t realized how pointless these challenges are, given current lifespans. The timer incessantly rings, but dinner's nowhere near cooked!


There's no choice but to embrace these vestigial alarms. That's the only way to play it.