Review: The Dictator's Handbook

 The Dictator's Handbook is a layman's exposition of selectorate theory. The idea behind the theory is that a political leader (yes, every dictator is a politician) will do anything to stay in power. The difference between a dictator and a democratic leader is the size of the coalition that brought them to power and keeps them there:

small coalitions encourage stable, corrupt, private goods–oriented regimes in which the essentials do great while even the broader support coalition does pretty poorly. The choice between enhancing social welfare and enriching a privileged few is not a question of how benevolent a leader is. Honorable motives might seem important, but they are overwhelmed by the need to keep essential supporters happy, and the means of keeping them happy depends on how many need rewarding. (page 31)

Basically, when you have a small group of people who you rely on to keep you in power, all you have to do is to buy them off with money, special privileges, huge private homes built at private expense, etc. Since no one else counts, the remainder of the money can be socked away in your Swiss bank account, used to buy private jets, etc. 

However, if your coalition is huge, it's too expensive to buy them off one at a time. At that point, the leader is now incentivized to provide public goods like improving the education system (grows the economy, so tax receipts improve), provide freedom of speech, freedom of association, better healthcare, etc.

The statistics are grim for democratic politicians: they rarely stay in power for long, while dictators get to stay in power for decades. The exception is at the beginning of their rule, where democratic leaders have a much higher survival rate in the first 6-12 months (during the honeymoon period), while dictators have a much lower survival rate. This explains why many dictators pretend to be democrats when they first come to power.

OK, there are examples of countries that shift from being dictatorships to becoming democratic countries. How do those happen? It turns out that dictators are human, and do age and die:

Impending death often induces political death. For this reason a leader’s health is the most important state secret. However, once a leader is dead the need for secrecy vanishes, so to gauge the importance of health we were able to collect data on the date and cause of death of political leaders from sources such as obituaries. On average, the risk of being deposed in any particular year is about 19 percent. However, for leaders like Marcos and the shah who have a serious chronic health condition that will lead to death within three years, this deposition risk nearly doubles. Health concerns particularly exacerbate the risk of removal by revolution and coup.5 The epitaph “died in office” is generally reserved for leaders who hide their illness. (pg. 50)

Whenever there's a leadership shuffle, the existing coalition no longer is assured that they would be the "in group" with the successor. When that happens, there's no incentive to protect the ruler, and public protests and revolutions go unanswered. Of course, whether one dictator just gets replaced with another dictator or a true democratic rule is a different story. The authors explain The Resource Curse as follows. The leader has to pay off his coalition. In a country with no natural resources, the only way to get that money is through taxes. But if those taxes get used to pay the coalition, then people lose the incentive to work, especially if the taxes are accompanied by draconian restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly. The leader eventually runs out of money and wants to increase his tax intake. The only way to do so is to improve productivity, and that leads to reducing restrictions on speech, etc. But that also leads to demands for better public services (which in and of themselves also improve productivity). But that incentive goes away if the country has oil. The production and sale of oil resources can be done entirely by non-citizens with the money funneling directly to the leader who can then only pay his coalition. Now he doesn't need the regular folks to be productive and can afford to be as oppressive as he likes! By the way, this means that when a poor country with a dictator runs out of money and the people are starving, the right thing to do isn't to send that country money! The dictator will just appropriate the money (or food aid, or other resources --- the book has plenty of examples) and use it to pay his coalition! By starving the dictator of money, he has no choice to either look for ways to improve the economy or he risks his coalition abandoning him to the revolution!

The book also explains why dictatorships have elections, even though they're by and large sham and fake:

the best way to stay in power is to keep the coalition small and, crucially, to make sure that everyone in it knows that there are plenty of replacements for them. This is why you will often read about regular elections in tyrannical states. Everyone knows that these elections don’t count, and yet people go along with them. Rigged elections are not about picking leaders. They are not about gaining legitimacy. How can an election be legitimate when its outcome is known before the vote even occurs? Rigged elections are a warning to powerful politicians that they are expendable if they deviate from the leader’s desired path. (page 84)

The authors point out that companies are also dictatorships:

doing a good job is not enough to ensure political survival. That is true whether one is running a business, a charity, or a national government. How much a leader’s performance influences the length of his tenure in office is a highly subjective matter. It might seem obvious that it is important to have people in the coalition of key backers who are competent at implementing the leader’s policies. But autocracy isn’t about good governance. It’s about what’s good for the leader, not what’s good for the people. In fact, having competent ministers or competent corporate board members can be a dangerous mistake. Competent people, after all, are potential (and potentially competent) rivals. The three most important characteristics of a coalition are (1) loyalty, (2) loyalty, and (3) loyalty. Successful leaders surround themselves with trusted friends and family, and rid themselves of any ambitious supporters. Carly Fiorina had a hard time achieving that objective, and as a result she failed to last long. Fidel Castro, by contrast, was a master (of course, he had fewer impediments to overcome in what he could do than did Fiorina), and he lasted in power for nearly half a century. (Page 81)

 The book also explains why top universities behave the way they do, which is that they are also small coalition political systems:

 If you doubt it, have a look one day at how many administrators university presidents like to hire compared to faculty. It seems you can never have too many supporting-cast administrators whose jobs depend on keeping the person at the top happy. Faculty, on the other hand, don’t have to keep their “bosses” happy; they have to keep their colleagues happy long enough to get tenure and then they are pretty free to do whatever they want—why do you think we can write this passage! There is a delicate balance to be struck, to be sure, and so successful university leaders are especially skilled at doling out private rewards to anyone who could be a threat. People who raise money for the university frequently get a percentage of what they bring in to incentivize them. Faculty who are cooperative are likely to more readily be granted sabbaticals, get research funds, pick the classes (usually small) that they teach, and so forth. So we shouldn’t be surprised by distortions in merit in universities; they really are small-coalition regimes. (pg. 138)

 Using this (admittedly) very cynical lens, the authors apply this framework across a number of domains and regimes. For instance, this explains why democracies tend to have good building codes and when natural disasters happen, they expect rescues to be fast and effective. Similarly, sports organizations like the International Olympic Committees and FIFA are small coalition systems so you expect huge amounts of corruption (and indeed they are).  Similarly, when dealing with corporate corruption, what you want to do is to increase the number of influencers on the board to the point where they are too expensive to be bought off, rather than introduce measures like Sarbanes-Oxley.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the section of war. It explains why democracies when they fight tend to fight harder and put more of their resources into battle. Because the coalition is so high, the value to each individual person to siphon off the resources into their pockets is comparatively low. (They estimate that during the Arab-Israeli 6 day war, the potential benefits on the Israeli side comes down to about $60 per person, while on the Egyptian side it's closer to $150,000 per person) For most Israelis $60 per person isn't enough to justify losing the war! Conversely a dictator is more concerned about protecting his own personal resources, so unless the war is easily won he'd much rather retreat or even lose ground than pour in more resources. One interesting side effect also explains why the United States has leaders who frequently proclaim their love of democratic values while quietly supporting dictators with bribes in the form of foreign aid. It's much cheaper to bribe a dictator who has a small coalition than to bribe the electorate of a democracy! Note that democratic leaders have very short expected terms in office, so they're much more impatient about getting results in time for the next election.

The recognition of Israel was an extremely unpopular policy shift in Egypt. This is why Sadat was able to extract so much from the United States. Unfortunately for Sadat, it also contributed to his assassination in 1981. Fundamentalists threw grenades and attacked with automatic rifle fire during an annual parade. Although it officially recognizes Israel, the Egyptian government has done almost nothing to encourage the Egyptian people to moderate their hatred for Israel. In a BBC survey conducted nearly thirty years after the Camp David agreement was struck, 78 percent of Egyptians indicated that they perceived Israel as having a negative impact in the world, far above the average in other countries in the survey.16 Of course, changing the negative attitude toward Israel in Egypt would just reduce the amount of aid the Egyptian government can extract from the United States. (pg. 201)

 The willingness of democracies to try harder goes a long way to explaining why seemingly weaker democracies often overcome seemingly stronger autocracies. The United States was once a weak nation. And yet in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) it defeated the much larger, better-trained, and highly favored Mexican army. The minuscule Republic of Venice survived for over a thousand years until it was finally defeated by Napoleon in 1797. Despite its small size and limited resources, it fought above its weight class throughout the Middle Ages. It played a crucial role in the Fourth Crusade, which led to the sacking of Constantinople, in which Venice captured the lion’s share of the Byzantine Empire’s wealth. The smaller but more democratic government of Bismarck’s Prussia defeated the larger—and widely favored—Austrian monarchy in the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866. Prussia then went on to defeat Louis Napoleon’s monarchical France in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War. And as we have seen, tiny Israel has repeatedly beaten its larger neighbors. History is full of democratic Davids beating autocratic Goliaths. (pg. 268)

 The book ends with a bunch of advice on how to encourage better behaved politicians. It definitely mentions that financial aid to a dictatorship is counter productive. But also ways to trigger transitions:

The incentives to encourage leaders to step aside could be further strengthened if, in exchange for agreeing to step down quickly, they would be granted the right to retain some significant amount of ill-gotten gains and safe havens for exile where the soon-to-be ex-leadership and their families can live out their lives in peace. Offering such deals might prove self-fulfilling. Once essential supporters believe their leader might take such a deal, they themselves start looking for his replacement, so even if the leader had wanted to stay and fight, he might no longer have the support to do so. The urge for retribution is better put aside to give dictators a reason to give up rather than fight. (pg. 339)

The book does have flaws. For instance, it was written right after 2022, so it's over optimistic about the US remaining a democracy. They claim over and over that countries with large coalitions have never backslid in history, but we can clearly see that by controlling the house, senate, the executive branch, and the supreme court, the Republicans are succeeding in reducing the size of their essential coalition. I definitely think they're excessively optimistic about this.

The other flaw I see is their claim that immigration increases the size of the coalition and therefore encourages countries to stay democratic and have better public policy. That's definitely not what we're seeing today, and in fact, there are plenty of studies showing that public policies like universal healthcare, etc., are more easily achieved in countries where immigration is kept to a very low level.  I don't know how the authors would explain that.

Regardless, I found myself highlighting passage after passage in this book. It's very much worth reading and thoroughly worth your time. Yes, I admit the book's title put me off but it shouldn't have.

June 9th: Bourg St. Maurice to Le Lechere

 Waking up I the morning, the skies were cloudy but it looked dry enough to ride. Arturo had made a reservation at Le Lechere and we had a 20 mile ride plotted out. The breakfast at the Base Camp Hotel was very good, and if the town had other attractions we could have stayed another night. After an initial false turn, the route took us down to a bike path along the river. If the entire ride was entirely like that I would have relaxed and enjoyed the day, but instead after a mere 10km the bike path rose and dumped us out onto a main road where we were climbing along with a fair amount of traffic. Fortunately, at the most difficult of the climb what appeared to be a local bike club joined us and gave us company (and confidence) before the road brought us to the SPA town.

The hotel looked popular for dinner and we would have the half pension for our two night stay there. They first had us park our bikes in what looked like a painter’s shed but because they were actually painting something they would move the bikes later into the cellar. The day was still young so Arturo proposed that we drive the car to Annecy for a rainy day visit. Xiaoqin was tired of sitting in the car so she opted to get her bike out and go for a ride instead, leaving Arturo, myself, Mark and the two kids to take the car ride.

The drive took a good 100 minutes because of traffic, and you could see during the drive that the Alps terminated right in Annecy. Of course, the ride from Geneva to Annecy would be a massive pain, and judging from the traffic not much fun. The town itself was rather cute, with lots of cool ice cream shops, Foies Gras for sale, and obviously on days with better weather than what we had we could have taken boat rides. But on days with better weather we probably would have been riding instead! It sprinkled here and there while we were walking around town and admiring the various bridges over the Thiou river which would eventually join up with the Rhone. Annecy is frequently called “The Venice of the Alps”. I’d never been to Venice but I wasn’t sure if the comparison was apt—the river was certainly not the transportation between buildings!

It was another 100 minute drive back, so by the time we got back to Le Lechere and showered it was dinner time. Dinner turned out to be rather good, but we were worn out to do much more than a cursory walk. Xiaoqin thought she could do Col du Madeline the next day while the rest of us planned a hike. Stephan would take the day to work while he was on tour so the car had room for all of us who wanted to hike.

Review: Eversion

 It's a testimonial to how busy the past year had been that I missed the publication of not just one, but two Alastair Reynolds novels! The benefit of this is that by the time I got around to Eversion, Amazon had it on sale for $1.99, which made it an autobuy.

Eversion starts as an 18th century story about a sailing ship exploring in the north of the Scandinavian coast, with the narrator as the ship's surgeon (named Silas Coades) aboard the vessel. The ship finds an inlet with a lagoon with a strange building or fortress on the inside of it. During the passage into the lagoon, the ship meets with a mishap, and the narrator dies. Before he dies, however, the lone woman aboard the ship, Ada Cossile, tells him that he's escaping by dying.

The narrative then resets, with Coades now aboard a steam engine vessel! Each time the narrative resets, much as in a video game, we get further into the mystery. Reynolds must have had a lot of fun writing this novel, because we get all sorts of scenarios, including a dirigible and even a space opera type scene before the big reveals happens and we get to find out what the underlying scenario is.

The payoff is not disappointing--unlike many science fiction novelists, Alastair Reynolds doesn't write himself into a corner, and everything resolves. The story is very appropriate in the age of AI, and reveals Reynolds to have a deep understanding of both humanity and the machines we create.

What a great novel! Definitely a must read!

June 8th: Flumet to Bourg St Maurice

 Waking up to a sunny day, we showed up to breakfast 5 minutes late. Despite that, it was clear that most items weren’t ready. The owner showed up a little later, frantically saying that everything would be ready soon. Either Arturo, Stephan, or Mark would tell me later that he’d just bought the hotel and hadn’t gotten the hang of everything yet.

When the breakfast was ready it was decent, and we ate our fill to prepare for our 2000m day. The climb up Sassies switched back frequently but unlike Columbiere was never super steep. The real climb would be up the Roseland in the afternoon. The descent was fast and at the bottom it was warm. When we got to Beaufort it was very warm. We got fruit, cold drinks, and bread at the supermarket and then ice cream.

Thus fortified, we started the climb up the Cormet de Roseland, our first 2000m high pass of the trip. A steady 8% grade, once we got into the forest it was warm but the trees shielded us from the sun’s burning rays. 

Plodding along, we saw a tall waterfall. The thing about climbing in the Alps is that whenever you see a waterfall, you know that you have to climb above it eventually if it’s anywhere near the road. In this case, once we were above the waterfall, we almost were at the Roseland lake just before the summit. Xiaoqin joined us there, and we rode up the pass together. Stephan had already gone ahead with his superior power to weight ratio. She had more energy than we did, so took a lot of pictures. At the summit we regrouped, got a pass photo, put on our jackets and began to descend. By this time we started to feel the occasional rain drops. Fortunately, we would stay ahead of the rain this time.

The top part of Cormet Roseland was composed of long straightaway segments and the tandem showed off its top end speed before the chain of switchbacks slowed us down and allowed Stephan to catch and then over-take us. By the time we got to the Bourg St. Maurice city limit sign it was warm and we stopped to take off our jackets and start looking at lodging.

It being a Monday, there was plenty of availability, and we in the end decided on riding to Base Camp Lodge to negotiate in person, since it looked intriguing and had dining options as well as an onsite washing machine. Getting there turned out to be a climb on top of already tired legs, but we managed it. Once there, we got rooms and I discovered a free EV charger provided we made a reservation with the hotel. The “reservation system” turned out to be the receptionist writing down on a piece of paper that we’d taken one of those spaces. When Xiaoqin arrived we parked the car in the spot and plugged it in without fuss or messing around with payment options, which was great.

By the time it was dinner time, rain had started in earnest, but we were indoors and I’d discovered the secret elevator to the restaurant that did not require that we walk outside. The meals were good, and the laundry machine while it required coins came with detergent. We got laundry done while having dinner, and after dinner the rain even let up sufficiently for us to take a walk.

There was no question that we needed a rest day. The question was whether to take a rest day here in Bourg St. Maurice or to take it in Le Lechere and commit to riding Col de la Madeline. With the rain forecast, we decided that it was a fool’s errand to wait until July 12^th for Col D’Iseran to open. I pointed out that there was Hotel Radiana in Le Lechere which was a SPA hotel. Arturo pointed out that their rules precluded Boen from using the hot springs.  There was a town swimming pool, however, and he found a well rated hotel (La Cabriere) with good food. We’d take a transfer day the next day, and another rest day to avoid the rain and also give Xiaoqin a chance to ride.

2026 Tour of the Alps Index Page

 

From June 6^th to July 6^th, Boen, Mark Brody, and myself executed a tour of the alps starting from Geneva and completing a loop into France, Italy, and Switzerland. Xiaoqin drove a support vehicle (a Volvo EX30 EV) for much of the trip and rode whenever circumstances permit. Stephan Ellner joined for a week, and Arturo Crespo joined us until we got to Hospental. Bowen came along for the hiking portions of the trip.

For Boen and I, we got in 862 miles of riding with 89994’ of climbing in 25 riding days, and 6 hiking days which added another 76 miles of walking. We had 3 flat tires, one of which was a thorn, and the other two were not identified during the trip but no other mechanicals. We had 3 train transfers (Leuk to Brig, Donat-Ems to Oberalp, Airolo to Andermatt), Xiaoqin had 2 bus transfers, and Mark took advantage of his half tax card to get in the Jobst high adventure path, which required Meiringen to Sarnen, the cable car from Stockalp to Melchsee Frutt, and the post bus from Meiringen to Rosenlaui.

On our hiking days, we used the Gemelsee Bahn, the train from Natschen to Andermatt, the post bus from Rosenlaui to Grosse Scheidegg, the train from Lauterbrunnen to Wengen, the cable car from Wengen to Mannlichen, the cable car from Stechelberg to Murren, and the Jochpass – Engstlensee cable car to achieve lift assisted hikes.

We lost 2 days to rain, both of which coincided with exhaustion where we needed rest days anyway.

This is the index page with links to pictures, videos, and day by day trip reports.

Photos

2026 Tour of the Alps Shared Photo Album

Videos

• Rosenlaui Classic Loop
• Engstlenalpsee
• Murren
• Yvoire
• Fahnenschwingen

Day by Day Trip Journal

• June 5th: Prologue
• June 6th: Geneva to Bonneville
• June 7th: Bonneville to Flumet
• June 8th: Flumet to Bourg St. Maurice
• June 9th: Bourg St Maurice to La Lechere
• June 10th: Arpettaz Loop
• June 11th: Le Lechere to Saint Francois Longchamp
• June 12th: Saint Francois Longchamp to Valloire
• June 13th: Valloire to Briancon
• June 14th: Briancon to Arvieux
• June 15th: Arvieux to Napoleon Refuge Vars
• June 16th: Napoleon Refuge Vars to Jausiers
• June 17th: Jausiers to Saint-Etienne-de-Tinee
• June 18th: Saint-Etienne-de-Tinee to Isola 2000
• June 19th: Isola 2000 to Ivrea
• June 20th: Ivrea to Aosta
• June 21st: Aosta to Grand St Bernard Hospice
• June 22nd: Grand St Bernard Hospice to Brig
• June 23rd: Brig to Hospental
• June 24th: Teufelsbrucke hike
• June 25th: Gelmelsee hike
• June 26th: Hospental to Donat-Elms
• June 27th: Hospental to Airolo
• June 28th: Hospental to Nessental Terrace Hotel
• June 29th: Nessental Terrace Hotel to Hotel Rosenlaui
• June 30th: Englehornhutte hike + Rosenlaui schlutz
• July 1st: St Beatus Caves + Trummelbachfalle
• July 2nd: Hotel Rosenlaui to Lauterbrunnen
• July 3rd: Murren North Face hike
• July 4th: Lauterbrunnen to Col des Mosses
• July 5th: Col des Mosses to Thonon-les-Bains
• July 6th: Thonon-les-Bains to Geneva
• July 7th: Epilogue

Review: Halcyon Years

 This year has been so busy that I missed that Alastair Reynolds wrote a new book, Halcyon Years that came out in January! The good news about that is that I don't have a wait at the library and could download it and read it right away.

The story revolves around Yuri Gagarin (yes, that Russian Cosmonaut), who has been brought back to life aboard the generation starship the Halcyon. The ship is huge: 50km in a rotating cylinder (to provide gravity), and big enough to have parks, lakes, a complete ecosystem. We never find out how the ship is powered, but clearly several generations have already lived on this starship.

The resurrected Gagarin is a private detective in what looks like a 1920s noir fiction future, complete with corrupt cops, no cell phones but wired land-lines, and at one point in his investigation, Gagarin acquires a robot companion.

The case starts when a mysterious lady calling herself Ruby Blue shows up, and asks Gagarin to look into the mysterious death of a couple, Randall and Juliana (an obvious allusion to Romeo and Juliet). We get a quick introduction to the power elite on Halcyon, who they are, and what happens.

Obviously several questions come to mind, including why is the tech level aboard the ship so low. Well, rest assured, Reynolds has all the bases covered and given the mysteries and the rapid pace of action (the book was so good I finished it over 3 days), I'd be doing you a disfavor by spoiling the plot and big reveals (there are multiple!) to you.

In any case, I found the reveals and the endings satisfying, and can whole heartedly recommend this book.

June 7th: Bonneville to Flumet

 Waking up to a generous breakfast, we loaded up the car only to discover that the tandem had a rear flat tire. An inspection of the tire carcass on both inside and outside, I found no foreign matter, and so replaced the inner tube, which turned out to have a leaking patch. I replaced that with a brand new TPU tube, which held this time. This used up all the battery on my electric pump, but there’s a reason I carry a battery bank, and it’s not for my almost 3 year old Pixel 8 Pro. I plugged the pump in and left it charging while we rode towards the bottom of our first pass, the Col de la Columbiere.

Once again, my memory lied to me. I remembered Col de la Columbiere as being an easy col because Mike Samuel and I had ridden up to it from Cluses on the road. However, from Bonneville, my new route had taken several short cuts which meant that we faced grades of 10-12% before joining up with the proper highway where it flattened out in the town of Les Respondir.

From there, the climb was manageable and quite pleasant, until near the summit where the grades went up again but we were finished well before noon. Xiaoqin and Bowen were doing a hike there—we spotted the car parked at the summit, but it was too early for lunch, so we descended the col. Every time I visit the alps I’m always surprised by how pretty it is. In the intervening years I’d forgotten how pretty Col de la Columbiere was on the descent, and when the road turned up again the hunger hit both me and Boen. We recruited Arturo to have lunch with us, but the others were well ahead and headed up the Col des Arravis already.

After lunch, we climbed to the summit of Col des Arravis, where short walks could take you the magnificent views of Mont Blanc. We had drinks or an ice cream, and then proceeded to descend to Flumet, where we had a hotel reserved for the night. Stephan had put together a size L Ritchey Montebello to the same specifications as Xiaoqin’s, with the exception that I told him to get ultralight Superteam Carbon wheels instead of the Ritchey wheelset, reasoning that if you’re paying the weight penalty for disc brakes you should try to get some of it back from carbon wheels that were relatively affordable. As I predicted, the Ritchey Montebello descended amazingly well, with its low bottom bracket and made-for-randoneuring frame geometry. Stephan was an aggressive descender on the tandem, and that comfort with speed translated directly to the Ritchey Montebello. While the tandem would still out-run him on any straight-line, if the descent had a lot of switch backs, he would catch and pass us on the corners, where the tandem had to brake earlier and slow to almost a stand-still on the corners before picking up speed again on the downslope. The tandem reached high speeds quickly on any kind of grade for us to even consider pedaling on descents.

At one point we stopped and lifted Stephan, Arturo's and Mark's bike, and to our surprise, the steel Ritchey Montebello was lighter than both Arturo and Mark's titanium bikes. Arturo's bike had a steel fork, so it wasn't much of a surprise, but Mark's bike had a carbon fork as well!

In Flumet, we stopped at the only hotel in town that was listed on booking.com. The owner was very friendly, and showed us to the dedicated bike room, and also recommended one of only two restaurants that were open this early in the season, the others all being closed. “Breakfast is at 7am”, he said confidently.

It being a Sunday, nothing was opened except the campground near the bottom of town. But Xiaoqin was so hungry by the time she showed up that she walked to it for ice cream. At dinner, we had what was essentially bar food.

After dinner, we walked around the town. I identified the fountain where Mike and I had taken a nap in 2005 prior to continuing with Col de Sassies—it had been taken over by another restaurant, which was why I didn’t immediately recognize it when I first saw it. We also found the old mill, which otherwise looked like an abandoned house by the river that was serviced by a cable platform.

We went to bed early. The next day was Monday and the forecast called for rain in the afternoon, but I thought that there was good reason for it to hold. The weather after that looked iffy, dashing my hopes for a climb up the Col D’ Iseran to see walls of ice 10’ tall. We didn't have to make any commitments, since the next day was a Monday and there would be plenty of lodging no matter where we ended up.

Review: Eight Billion Genies

 Eight Billion Genies explores a fun concept, which is that if everyone on earth had one wish, what would people do with it, and what would the resultant world be like? The book starts out in a bar where the bartender in a fit of inspiration immediately wishes that nobody else's wishes can affect the bar and whatever and whoever is inside it. Turns out the guy's a prepper and was prepared for things to turn out dark.

Indeed, the book goes through the initial impulsive phase, where the folks with no impulse controls immediately start wishing for whatever would suit them in the moment, followed by the folks who're coherent enough to start wishing for super powers, or wishing for their country's' welfare, etc. The author comes up with rules that the genies enforce on how conflicting wishes work.

Pretty soon, the population of the world is diminished by a lot, and then you get the religious people going for pretty much a rapturing of the earth, which kills even more people, of course.

When all is said and done people use up their wishes and by the time the book comes to a close, there are only 2 people with wishes left, and obviously the last one gets to remake the world, but it's clear at the end of the book the author's written himself into a corner and doesn't have a good answer for what the final wish should be either (it's vague and probably wouldn't change anything).

Nevertheless, it's a fun short read and worth the time.

 

June 6th: Geneva to Bonneville

 Waking up at 5:30am in the morning due to jet lag, I went down to the front desk and started assembling the bikes. Xiaoqin’s road logic came together easily and well, and I was as finished as I could be within an hour. The tandem came together less easily, but by 7:30am I had it all together. Despite my best efforts, however, I could not get the bike to shift into the lowest gear. This would be a big problem during the tour, so I searched for bike shops nearby. None of them opened before 8:30am, which was not a problem since I had arranged for only a 20 mile transit day.

We ate breakfast, and then I rode over to the bike shop to try to get help. While the shop manager was initially resistant because he had a fully booked service department, he eventually relented and a mechanic rolled my bike onto a fully electrified workstand. While working on the bike he identified the problem, which was that the anchor bolt for the derailleur cable had been stripped and could no longer be tightened to spec. He replaced the bolt and got everything adjusted to spec. It would strike me later that this was another argument for going to a fully wireless shifting setup—this type of failure mode would be impossible.

In the meantime, Stephan had gotten onto his train from Munich but had discovered a missing SPD shoe bolt. After paying the shop for the work, I biked back to the hotel, and together with Xiaoqin took the shuttle over to the airport to pick up our rental car, which turned out to be a Volvo EX30 electric car. We had reasoned that the way to avoid expensive European gas prices would be to rent an electric car. The reason for all this was that unlike in the previous year, Bowen refused to ride his bike at all this year, so the plan was for Xiaoqin’s road logic to live in the car, and on days when Xiaoqin wanted to ride, she would park Bowen somewhere. If you’re supporting a bicycle tour with an EV, there’s no range anxiety—our days would not be longer than a 100km at a time, and a tour of the alps had the characteristic that some of the energy spent driving up mountains would be returned to you on the descent. Hertz at the Geneva Airport supplied us with a CCS charging cable but not one that would take a household outlet. They explained that we could return the car with 75% charge and that would be OK.

Having everything squared away, it was time to load up the car with everything not necessary for riding and head to Bonneville. There was an event that Saturday that involved thousands of cyclists taking up most of the lodging in Cluses. I disliked making reservations, but in this case opted for Hotel des Alpes in Bonneville because they took a low deposit to secure our lodging. In any case, with the antics Aer Lingus had played on us the previous night, we were in no shape to keep riding past Bonneville anyway!

We rode downhill from the Geneva airport into downtown Geneva where we got a beautiful view of the lake and the huge fountain that defined the town in so many pictures. Along the lakeshore, we turned onto the bike path. I’d remembered from 2005 that the ride from Geneva to Cluses went past lots of shops, so we did not stop for lunch in downtown Geneva for food, which was a mistake—in 2005 I did not have RidewithGPS or Komoot, and so had just ridden by following signs away from the train station!

This time, the route followed the official bike path out of Geneva into France, where we stopped for photographs for our transition into a new country. From there, the route took pains to bypass village/suburban commercial centers in favor of granting us beautiful views of the Alps before us.

By the time we arrived at Bonneville at 2:00pm we were quite hungry. However, we had caught the hotel owner as she was going out for a bike ride with her son. She paused to check us in, show us where the car parking was, and then told us where the closest supermarket was, which turned out to be quite a significant ride away. We bought what proved to be a disappointing lunch, after which we got settled into the hotel and took showers.

Xiaoqin and Bowen would show up much later, after a visit to CERN first. Stephan had gotten off the train, gotten a free SPD bolt from a bike shop, and had started riding towards us.

Arturo and I took the EV out to see how charging it would work. The car came with some form of Google maps integration that allowed searching for charging stations, though we would discover much later that the charging map frequently were missing charging stations or was incomplete in other ways. Nevertheless, this being my first time with an EV, I appreciate Arturo’s experience (he owned a Swasticar, uh, Tesla Model Y) and was familiar with how EV charging behaved—much like a smartphone, it would charge fastest when fully depleted, and then slow down, so it rarely made sense to charge it to 100%. Different places would also have different rules about whether you would have to pay for occupying a charging space after you were fully charged, and frequently there would be an outrageous deposit to be paid prior to plugging the car in, and then the charging company would take its time refunding you the difference. Every so often even paying for charging was an obscenely complicated experience requiring a working web-browser (not always easy for someone on a T-mobile slow international roaming plan). Having said that, for the entire trip, I would only once be completely unable to charge and have to switch charging stations to find one that would allow a foreign credit card. It annoyed the heck out of me that these stations required registration, a dedicated app, or sign up. Why not just let me swipe or tap an NFC credit card and then just charge? If fueling stations for gas cars were so demanding of their customers gas cars probably wouldn’t stay popular for that long.

Dinner was at a La TablEnvie, as the hotel restaurant was closed. We would repeatedly find out during the trip that we were at the leading edge of the summer season, with many lodging or other tourist facilities only opening after we had come and gone.

Going to bed early that night in an attempt to claw back hours of sleep lost to us by Aer Lingus, I had high hopes that the ride in the Alps properly would be as invigorating as they were for me years ago.

June 5th: Prologue

Since there were no direct flights to Geneva, we chose to fly through Dublin on Aer Lingus. We were driven to SFO by Steve Wang. We arrived at the checkin counter fairly early, and managed to get our bike boxes through oversized baggage in pretty decent time. One weird thing abotu Aer Lingus is that their flight to Dublin departs from the domestic terminal, not the international terminal.

While the flight itself was fine, despite the flight landing early in Dublin, the gate we were supposed to deport through was occupied by a United airlines flight with engine trouble, so we were stuck on the ground for over an hour, which caused us to miss our connector to Geneva.

After we were offboarded, the customer service agents re-routed us through Heathrow to get to Geneva, advising us to get an ETA for the UK. The flight to Heathrow was an ordeal, though the flight to Geneva went relatively smoothly. To this date, Aer Lingus has refused to grant us any compensation for our flight delay, nor have we been reimbursed for the expensive food we had to buy in London due to the delay. This was quite an unpleasant experience, as we landed in Geneva well after 10:00pm.

Fortunately, despite all the crazy transfers, all bike boxes arrived, and the transfer to the hotel went without trouble. We slept as quick as we could but it was already midnight by the time we got settled in.

Review: The Power Fantasy

 The Power Fantasy is another take on "What if Superheroes were real?" It's a unique take, partly because the super-powers it imagines are really interesting. For instance, their superman equivalent is a black woman who's an angel sent from heaven to protect the Earth. Her counter-part, Etienne, is a black man who's a strict utilitarian who's an omni-telepath. (How many comic books have a superhero call himself a utilitarian?)

The definition of Superpower, as the cover of the books like to proclaim, is the power equivalent to a nuclear arsenal --- power sufficient to destroy the world. From here, we get the interaction between the super-powered beings and the nuclear superpower (the United States government), and the conflicts between the powered beings themselves, not all of whom are as good as the angel, or as forward thinking as Etienne.

Over time, additional super powers are introduced, some of whom make no sense to me as being part of the story. For instance, there's a girl whom everyone is scared of, because if she gets upset then the earth will end. That sounds like an easy thing for the utilitarian to get rid of, but we never get an explanation of what the consequences are.

We see a fully realized history, where multiple crisis happen some of which leads to entire continents being destroyed, yet the American government still insist on trying to get rid of part of the super-powered folks?

What I did find correct was that in the end, the angel agrees with Etienne, realizing that the only ethical approach is to let him take over the world. It turns out that a world that successfully kills Etienne quickly degenerates into a disaster.

The art is very good, though the letter could stand to do a better job not lettering words in red when the background is red--or maybe that's just an artifact of me reading this on a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft.

Review: Die

 Die is a comic book series divided into 4 volumes: Fantasy Heartbreaker, Split the Party, The Great Game and Bleed. It is a complete story arc and the volumes cannot be read out of order and do not stand alone.

The book starts great. The players are gathered for a birthday party, and the present is a free form Role Playing game with unique characters. Each player is given a die (hence the name of the series) that represents his or her character, and the game master names the player's class based on the player's descriptions. Then he declares that this is a special game where the game master is also one of the player and they're swept into the fantasy realm the game is in! A couple of years later, the players come back traumatized and without the game master. We then get the backstory of what happened, and of course, at a reunion the players are once again swept into the fantasy world.

There's at first a lot of the skewering of tropes in fantasy role playing games. For instance, one of the players kills a quest giver to avoid getting assigned a silly quest that they don't want to do. We get very nice exposure to what's a nicely created unique set of characters with very cool powers. Stephanie Hans does amazing art and the images are very beautiful. The author, Kieran Gillen then starts weaving into the narrative the history of war games, fantasy role playing, starring classic authors.

Unfortunately, by the middle of the third book we have a plot mess. We have meta gaming, a time travel conundrum, and overall, where everything is going and why the players had to be traumatized. I began to sense that the author had wrote himself into corner. Indeed, when I got to the ending, I found myself annoyed, as the conclusion made you think the entire thing was a waste of time (sic). There's a bootstrap paradox time loop that doesn't explain anything. There's a claim that the villain isn't an agent but is instead the concept of a role playing game despite the villain having been shown in the past to deliberately trap, manipulate, and traumatizes the players, and there's no real resolution of actual characters.

There's so much that could have been done with this concept (especially with an artist this talented drawing for you). But the ending felt like the author running away from conundrums and questions he himself created instead of tying everything up neatly. I'd say that it's worth reading the first two volumes and then pretending that the last two were never written. Just like I treat Battlestar Galactica as comprising of the mini series and the first 2 seasons and the first 4 episodes of the 3rd season and I pretend the rest of the series never happened.

Review: The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

 The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories is a short story collection by Walter Jon Williams. The titular story wasn't all the exciting or interesting. I guess what happened between when it was written and today is that global heating became a much bigger problem and famine became a much less problem, and nowadays we understand that the underlying cause (inequality) isn't a technological problem but rather a social problem that won't be solved by technology.

The first story in the collection is Daddy's World, which is interesting and holds its interest. In fact, most of the stories in the book are about childhood, parenting, and the constant conflict between parents and their offspring, themes that will hold for as long as there are parents and children. Most of these are a lot of fun to read, though none of them address the fundamental problem that the world is facing today, which is that offspring is a societal benefit but a major expense and cost borne by individual families, and society hasn't decided that imbalance is worth correcting.

In any case, I enjoyed most of the stories in this book--there's one that I skipped because I have no interest in Westerns, but otherwise it was well worth the kindle price of $5.

Review: The Fortunate Fall

 The Fortunate Fall was ChatGPT Pro's recommendation after I asked it to find similar novels to There is no Antimemetics Division. I got even more excited when I read Jo Walton's introduction, which praised the book claiming that it deserved to be an important book instead of becoming an obscure piece.

At first, the book seemed promising, since it clearly anticipated the rise of the social media influencer (known in the book as a Camera, --- the book's protagonist is Maya), who not only records what she sees but also her feelings and has the skill to imagine scenes on the fly as she watches an event. The camera is assisted by a screener to make her feelings cohere for an audience. 

So far as good. One day, her current screener is replaced by a mysterious new one, whom she tries to reject but seems to have so many super powers and works so hard that she admits that she has value. The rest of the plot then becomes how Maya is manipulated both by her screener but one of her interviewees into revealing a McGuffin and that broadcast is meant to spread brain viruses to the entire population.

From there the entire climax of the book falls apart. Usually when a plot falls apart it's because the author wrote himself/herself into a corner and couldn't figure out how to resolve it. In this case, the author completely abandons any coherence about what the book is about and turns the book into philosophical exposition, backstory about Maya (which is also only semi-coherent) and the book completely falls apart the same way Battlestar Galactica fell apart in its final season.

The book clearly anticipates several trends (it was written in 1996), but to be honest, I think the book fell into obscurity for very good reasons. There's no emotional payoff for reading the book (the ending is a giant mess and none of the characters are likeable), and several ancillary features in the book demonstrate that the book was woke well ahead of its time (the author is now transgender), but that by itself cannot (and did not) save the book.

That's a couple of hours of my life I'll never get back. I guess I've learned that I can't trust ChatGPT's recommendations or even Jo Walton's.

Review: Slow Gods

 Slow Gods is Claire North's "science fiction" allegorical novel set in a far future space. I use "science fiction" in quotes because there's really very little science in this novel. It's more like a fantasy novel with science fictional trappings. The premise here is that the FTL travel requires pilots to confront a Lovecraftian type horror during the traverse, to the point where most pilots go insane after just one or two trips.

The protagonist is a special case, coming from a hyper-capitalistic society ("The Shine") where you accrue debts starting from birth, and have to work to pay it off. Everything's run by corporations, and what matters is how "shiny" you are, which is mostly about money, but also about being an influencer.

The novel has lots of allegories, obviously, to modern American society, and brings in allegories about global warming (in the form of a supernova that will sterilize all planets within a few hundred light years of the supernova, but with the worlds given several hundred years of warning in advance). There's also more allegories about the Palestinian Israeli conflict. By the time you're done reading this you're kinda burned out on allegories, which makes this book very weak. Pile on huge numbers of new pronounces being invented by the author for various space-faring races, and you've got a super-woke novel that probably will not age well.

The part about being slow gods is where there's an advanced machine sentience in the story that's been providing all space faring races with predictions of 99% accuracy, and the protagonist of the novel is manipulated by this advanced machine intelligence in order to bring down the Shine. This is awesome wish fulfillment, but as good fiction it failed for me even though I agree with most of the politics behind the novel.

Review: Do Hard Things

 Do Hard Things has the subtitle that it's about how the conventional idea of toughness is wrong. I picked it up expecting some wishy washy reference to literature like grit (which has long been debunked), and was very surprised when it turned out to actually say a ton of sensible things. (Management books, like parenting books tend not to be sensible) For instance:

Authoritarian parenting leads to lower independence, more aggressive behavior, and a higher likelihood for substance abuse and risky behaviors. In sport, the controlling, demanding style also fails. On the athletic fields, it’s linked to lower grit and an increase in emotional exhaustion, burnout, and fear of failure. (kindle loc 151)

I've read a number of parenting books about how authoritarian parenting is wrong, but none of them ever actually wrote down what the consequences were! The author, Steve Magness, turns out to have been some sort of high level running coach, and so his emphasis is on athletic performance rather than say team management.

My high level summary of the book is that building a high performance team depends on two things: selection (who you hire or recruit into the team), and how you nurture the team (how you manage the team once you've hired them). His point is that a lot of the conventional wisdom is about boot camp building toughness, but the reality is that boot camp is about weeding out people (i.e., selection), and after that the military actually works on giving its soldiers the tools to succeed before putting them through the punishing programs (i.e., there's quite a bit of nurturing and management going on). Mistaking the selection process for the management process is what causes people to think that authoritarian parenting or dictatorship style management works. From a manager's point of view, you should be tough during the selection process (i.e., your interview process should be rigorous, thorough, and tough), but once you've built the team, other parts of management become more important.

Contrary to our old-school expectations, developing toughness doesn’t involve training camps from hell or exercise as punishment. It doesn’t involve cruel, demanding bosses with little appreciation of the individual. It doesn’t involve strict, one-way-communication parenting with little feedback from your child on their needs. As my good friend Brad outlined when explaining what he’d learned in his first few years of parenting, “At any moment, your child can go from fine to a fit. After a long day, it’s easy to want to yell at them and tell them to grow up. But, especially with young kids, you have to realize that the emotions they’re feeling are real. Even if they’re inconsequential. It requires all the patience in the world, but I try to ask myself, how can I meet them at their level, explain it, and use it as a teachable moment. Yelling at them, exerting excessive control, all that does is teach them to be afraid of you. Why would I want to ingrain to only listen because they’re afraid of me?” (kindle loc kindle loc 3218)

 One of the most important pieces on this book is something that almost no other management books mention, which is the importance of eating with your team:

Gregg Popovich is the legendary coach of the San Antonio Spurs. When it comes to creating a team culture, he’s the envy of just about every coach, CEO, or leader out there. His players rave about the bonds they still hold with their teammates years later. One player recently said, “I was friends with every single teammate I ever had in my [time] with the Spurs. That might sound far-fetched, but it’s true.” One key to such cohesion? Team meals. Popovich dinner stories are almost apocryphal. Three-hour meals, with Popovich expertly choosing the wine and food. Tables arranged so that the players maximize interaction. Popovich eschews the NBA tradition of jetting out of the city straight after a game, and instead, the Spurs go straight to a meal and stay the night. No set agenda other than time together, and certainly no ropes courses or other contrived team-bonding activities...You can’t force cohesion or unity. It doesn’t come from trust falls, gimmicky bonding activities, or forced interaction. It comes from being real. From allowing people to lower their defenses and feel comfortable enough to be who they are. You can’t force it. All you can do is create the space for it to happen. The magic wasn’t in Popovich’s team dinners. It was in his creating space for genuine interaction...If you are at a company get-together or dinner and everyone is looking down at their phone, you’ve created the wrong environment. (kindle loc 3326-3363)

I've always had a low opinion of those fake bonding events, and here's one guy who understands that ropes courses, trust falls, etc aren't worth money compared to just freaking sitting down and eating with your team on a frequent basis.

The actual part of the book about management comes from asking your people to have a realistic sense of what they or cannot do, giving them control over which outcomes they want to achieve and how to achieve them, and then providing a way for the team to work together. It's really that simple, but so few managers successfully do this, out of a misguided sense that management is about yelling at people and trying to get the to do what they don't want to do.

This is a great book. If you want to learn how to manage (or parent), you owe it to yourself to read this book.