Review: Fist of the North Star Vols 1-10

 I had fond memories of Fist of the North Star from teenage years. It's got a stoic hero who mostly lets his fists do the talking (in the 1980s anime version, he could talk without moving his chin too!), it's got this post-apocalyptic look reminiscent of Mad Max (lots of leather and chains, lots of spikes on the leather), and over the top campy dialogue. (The guy says: "You are already dead," so many times that we parodied that) The first 10 volumes of the series covers the original story arc, and if you read that and stop, the story resolves itself. It's clear that most of the series' writing was improvised, with the author saying that he expected to be able to take a break after the first series and was instead told to deliver more within a month!

To my surprise, the library has the entire collection, which I never read, so I checked it out one book at a time. This is really campy stuff, so you can't really binge the whole series at once because it gets really silly. What surprised me was that unlike modern comics where the origin story and the resolution of the initial impetus of the plot takes multiple volumes to deal with (I'm looking at Frieren, where the author and artist couldn't even be bothered to finish the story, despite having multiple years off), Fist of the North Star finishes its entire arc within the first volume. It's not even a bad finish, with surprising twists.

The art is incredibly dynamic, though sometimes quite silly. The premise is that Kenshiro is the inheritor of a secret assassination technique called "Hokuto Shinken". This technique allows him to hit various channeling points in the human body that causes insane effects. Heads explode, bodies come apart, and sometimes he can even achieve programmatic effect like causing you to die 3 minutes from when he hit you. Of course, his opponents also always have their own secret martial arts techniques, and just like in Pokemon (I'm pretty sure this series predated Pokemon), everyone has a penchant for yelling out their secret technique's name and even explaining it in combat. It's all very hokey. One example was when Kenshiro faces a sumo wrestler of some sort who has so much fat on his body that he couldn't get to the channeling points. Well, Kenshiro is no dummy, so he uses a rapid series of kicks to shift the fat away from a channeling point and when the channeling point is revealed he strikes it and wins the day.

The problem with having a hero/protagonist with such power is that the escalation gets crazy. Each opponent he faces has to have even more super powers or secret techniques, and by the 8th book you're pretty far along (turns out that there are multiple inheritors of the secret techniques, and then he gets to fight all of them). 

That's probably not the worst thing. The worst thing is that it's a 1980s adolescent boys' comic. The women in the books are there for decoration or for rescuing. Even when they supposedly have martial arts abilities they are easily captured and then used as bait for Kenshiro to show up and look heroic. Much more recent comics probably do not have this problem.

Nevertheless, this is the kind of stuff where if you're exhausted after a long day it does not require much intellectual brainpower to process the comic, and the art is still dynamic and exciting after all these years.

Review: Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1-2

 I was so impressed with Absolute Superman that I decided to check out Absolute Wonder Woman. The first two books in this ongoing series are The Last Amazon and As My Mothers Made Me.I've been told that the Absolute books are all set in the same universe, but that doesn't matter to either the Superman or Wonder Woman books so far. There's no interaction between the characters, and to be honest, the Wonder Woman's version of this book is a lot less grim. It's almost like the California in the Wonder Woman books don't belong to the same country as the Kansas in the Superman books.

This version of Wonder Woman is both visually and from a background point of view very different from the traditional Wonder Woman. In addition to her magic bracelets and lasso, she carries a giant sword like you may have seen in some Japanese video game RPGs. Her background is also very different. Rather than coming from Paradise Island, she's literally from Hell, having been given to Circe when she was a baby. Instead of the Invisible Jet, she rides her undead horse, Pegasus.

The two books out so far mostly deal with mythical threats as well as providing the background as to who Diana is. Yes, there's still a Steve Trevor, and yes, he's still a good guy. This version of Wonder Woman still has a supporting cast, and nothing bad seems to happen to them, so it's definitely not as Grim Dark as Absolute Superman. You get a very strong dose of Greek mythology, though some of these monsters never existed as part of the Greek myths, so you have to be careful when reading.

The art is not to my taste. That doesn't mean it's bad, it's just that sometimes it doesn't look to me like it's drawn by a professional comics artis who put serious elbow grease into the work. It's almost as though there's a team of artists on the book and not all of them are getting paid enough to bother.

The DC superheroes in the past have never been as interesting as the most popular Marvel characters (e.g. Spider-man). This is still true. Superman is still a boy scout. Wonder Woman is still a symbol for feminist women. But these new twists on those characters are a nice change!

Review: Absolute Superman Vol 1 & 2

 I missed all the hoopla when DC announced the new absolute universe, so I only picked up Last Dust of Krypton when I finished Die and the Hoopla recommendation engine told me to check this one out. The cover art looked absolutely gorgeous, so I borrowed it and read it. And then checked out Son of the Demon right after that.

This is an alternate Superman, where Kal-El comes to Earth not as a baby but instead as a young boy. It reimagines the meaning of the S symbol, and this Earth is a hellscape that's evocative of what billionaires on this planet are turning the Earth into. (Krypton is no different, and two books give you plenty of glimpses of what Krypton was like)

The villain that this Superman faces is also different from the traditional Lex Luthor (though Brainiac does show up). It's also fun seeing a different Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. The Superman cape also literally now has a mind of its own.

The core of the character remains the same, though he's got a lot less power and obviously the science is still missing --- Superman was always a fantasy story, not science fiction. When I think about it, I still think Miracleman is still by far the best Superman-style story ever told, but this version of Superman is at least different enough that I'm curious to see where the writers go with it. At the very least the art was consistently good. Recommended.

Review: Rise of the Dungeon Master

 Rise of the Dungeon Master is a recounting of the history of D&D, told in comic book format. It is short and easy to read, something you can finish in less than an hour. The art is crude but effective, and one of the most interesting properties about the narrative is that it alludes to D&D but speaking to you in the second person, occasionally giving you choices.

The story provides very minor biographical details about Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and does a good job of avoiding siding with either side when their relationship turned acrimonious, mostly because Gygax left Arneson out of the company he started. It's clear that as a businessman, Gygax was way out of his depth (the guy was a high school dropout, and had lots of other things on his mind), and lost control of his company despite his success because he didn't keep a handle on the CEOs he brought in to help run the company.

Don't expect great detail about the various editions of D&D or even the business battles that went on behind the scenes, many of which were covered by NDA anyway. But for a short quick read that doesn't waste your time I can recommend it.

Review: The Battle of Space Fort Jefferson and Other Stories

 I remember Timothy Zahn as being the author of militaristic science fiction (including some very well regarded Star Wars books), but have never read any of his short stories, so when The Battle of Space Fort Jefferson and Other Stories went on sale I bought it and read it.

To my surprise, none of the stories in the book are militaristic science fiction (including the titular stories). Many of them do involve the Park Service in one form or another, with the protagonist being a park ranger of some sort. Many stories feel like they're the start of a longer story, ending in a critical spot (including one superhero type story involving blue men).

All of the stories are workman like fiction. One of them feels like an episode from The Twilight Zone, and many feel like they could have been standalone episodes in some sort of TV show. Few of them made me want to run out and by other Timothy Zahn books. One of the bigger disappointments was that there were no author's notes attached to each story, so you never got any context as to why or how the story was written.

Nevertheless, any short story collection where I read every book in the volume is above average. I can recommend this.

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.

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!

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.

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.

 

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: 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: 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.

 

Review: The Gone World

 After reading There is no Anti-Memetics Division, I went to ChatGPT Pro and asked for other books like it that I might have missed over the years. It gave me a bunch of books I'd already read, as well as books I'd already bounced off of, but one book that hit was The Gone World, published in 2018 and apparently won a few awards but somehow never got my attention.

The book revolves around Shannon Moss, who is an investigator for crimes related to the navy. The background and backstory is heavy on science fiction, however, positing that the Navy had discovered a way to traverse both deep space and time. The rules of time travel are as follows:

1. You can only travel forward in time, but not backwards in time.
2. Jumping ahead in time grants you access to a universe that hasn't happened yet and might never exist. Each forward jump therefore gives you a unique universe, that may never be repeated.
3. Returning to your own time, you aged normally depending on how much time you spent in the universe you were in. You can bring back information or people (the latter is rare), but none of the evidence is admissible in court.

What's happening in Moss' experience is that there's a world extinction event in the future, which causes the death of humanity. What's disturbing is that that extinction event keeps getting closer and closer into the future. But that's not her job. Her job is to investigate crimes, and one multiple serial murder is happening, at which point she gets involved.

Given her affiliation with the navy, she gets to jump forward in time to get an idea of what happens. At this point the story flips back and forth between being a crime thriller (will she rescue the girl in time), complete with an insane serial killer villain, and a science fiction time-travel story (can we save the world). For many books and writers this would be too hard to mix together, but somehow this story works. We get recurring characters, visiting them in multiple timelines, some of whom are victims and some of whom become villains. Moss herself at one point discovers that she might have caused the death of one of her friends due to her using an identity while time traveling.

The book is impressively well plotted, though there are a few plot holes, and the ending was great (the post-ending was anti-climatic, but appropriate). This is a great book. Not as good as There is no Anti-Memetics Division, but still excellent and well worth your time.

Review: How to Win A Trade War

 How To Win A Trade War is a breezily written, conversational book about trade economics. At its best, it provides cool statistics about trade that you didn't know. For instance:

When the EU dropped barriers to trade in services among its members, it became easier for, say, Polish plumbers to accept contracts in France at lower wages, costing their French competitors work. One study found that unemployment in particularly exposed areas rose and over ten years later still hadn’t fully recovered. (kindle loc 243)

There's also an acknowledgement uncommon amongst economists that increased trade leads to the current deplorable right-wing movement in politics:

 British voters in places where jobs were more vulnerable to Chinese competition were more likely to back Brexit. In the 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton pushed through the controversial NAFTA trade deal to warnings that liberalization would destroy American jobs. While trade wasn’t billed as a very important issue in subsequent elections, the US voters most exposed to imports from Mexico responded by shifting toward the Republican Party. Then there was America’s “China shock.” Regions more exposed to import competition from China saw TV viewers shift to Fox News and campaign contributions to moderates drop. Polarization increased (elite lefties are just as capable of being hostile toward free trade as those on the right). But only the Republicans gained vote share where it mattered. In 2016, the effect was big enough to tip the vote and bring President Trump into office. (kindle loc 1344)

It's amazing that only Republicans gain vote share whenever free trade is involved. There's a lot of support in this book about how China misbehaves by deliberately subsidizing its state owned enterprises to ignore profitability. Effectively, Chinese companies get to ignore price signals and continue overproduction of goods as a way to retain or increase jobs.

 The final grounds for suspicion related to the response of Chinese companies to normal market dynamics. Even when demand was depressed, China’s production steamed ahead. The Chinese ramped up their shipbuilding capacity as world trade volumes collapsed by more than a fifth between 2008 and 2009. And their steel exports grew by 76 percent (that’s a lot) between 2021 and 2024 to their highest level ever, all while global demand for steel fell by 5 percent. When prices fall, that is the market’s way of telling producers that they should curb supply. When the Chinese didn’t want to hear the message, the burden of adjustment fell on the rest of the world. (kindle loc 1920)

To be honest, it's not just economists that should hang their head in shame for not pointing this out loud and clear during the 2000s. It seems to me that military strategists are also behind the 8 ball. Western countries losing shipbuilding capability should have rang alarm bells all throughout NATO but apparently nobody did (or even said) anything.

Finally, the book talks about how to properly compensate people who lose their jobs from free trade:

The US experience offers one more conclusive piece of evidence on how to support workers affected by trade-related disruptions. Trade Adjustment Assistance was a program designed to help workers hurt by imports to find new jobs. It was small and doesn’t exist anymore. (The United States works hard to sustain its reputation for having a terrible social safety net.) But for older workers, it included an interesting component: wage insurance. If you lost your job and found a new one at a lower wage, the government would top up 50 percent of the difference for up to two years. In effect, the government was subsidizing workers’ adjustment to their financial shock. A study of the program found that eligible workers were much more likely than their ineligible counterparts to find a job quickly. That cut government spending on unemployment benefits and raised income tax payments so much that the scheme paid for itself. (This is what is known as a “wow” result.) Awkwardly, the scheme didn’t effectively encourage people to switch industries altogether, maybe because eligible workers were a little older and less keen to embark on a whole new career. And because it helped workers after losing their jobs, it probably wouldn’t encourage workers to switch jobs before a trade war broke out. But as a shock mitigation program, it’s worth a look. (kindle loc 2424)

If you think the book is snarky, it's true --- the authors try very hard to keep things light-hearted (a little too hard, in fact), and I think the book could have been shortened significantly if the authors weren't trying to be so cute all the time.

In any case, I enjoyed the book and found it a good use of my time. Recommended. 

Review: Our Dollar, Your Problem

 Our Dollar, Your Problem is Ken Rogoff's book about the dollar's primacy as the global currency. How did it come about? How does the US benefit from its use as the primary currency? And what are the burdens that the US bear because the rest of the world feels obliged to hold such dollar reserves. Ken Rogoff was the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, so he's credible and knows what he's talking about.

In this book, you get inside baseball about how the decisions of the international organizations are run:

“When there is a dispute between two small nations, the UN steps in and the dispute disappears. When there is a dispute between a small nation and a large nation, the UN steps in and the small nation disappears. When there is a dispute between two large nations, the UN disappears.” (kindle loc 2319)

Rogoff makes many claims that will be surprised by. For instance, he thinks that the exchange rate control that China imposed was not responsible for the huge Chinese trade surpluses:

the exchange rate undervaluation story misses perhaps the most important device the Chinese authorities were using to keep their economy so hypercompetitive: the steady migration of millions of people each year from agrarian rural China to its cities and manufacturing centers. The real problem that Western economies were facing was a never-ending stream of impoverished rural Chinese being lifted out of desperate poverty each year through the chance to work in the productive city centers. Exchange market intervention might have contributed to the supposed undervaluation of China’s currency, but it was likely secondary. (kindle loc 3155)

 In other words, the real economy is what's driving Chinese trade surpluses and insanely competitive prices, not just exchange rate intervention. Similarly, while the US does gain some benefit from being able to borrow in its own currency, the benefit is not that big compared to the real drivers of the American economies and the wild deficit financed spending of both parties.

Interestingly enough, Rogoff spends a lot of time knocking down the idea that deficits don't matter and that interest rates would stay low forever. The thing is, he could have published this book in 2019 before the pandemic and then really made good on his predictions, instead of waiting until 2025 to do it. He never comes out and say why interest rates would rise (is it because the world is running out of savings? capital controls?). In any case he does congratulate himself for predicting the increased interest rates of the post pandemic world (partly due to high inflation), but he also notes that it was never a given that the dollar would last as long as it did as the world's currency:

Had Russia liberalized its economy in the mid-1960s, had Japan not allowed itself to be browbeaten into a destabilizing currency appreciation in the mid-1980s, had France not insisted on including Greece in the euro in 2001, or had China moved to a full-fledged floating exchange rate regime in 2010’s, the dollar would likely still be on top, but perhaps not nearly to the extent it is today. In any of these alternative realities, U.S. interest rates would probably be higher; the dollar’s exorbitant privilege less. (kindle loc 5283)

In any case, I think Americans by accelerating the decline of the dollar's dominance (by electing officials who appear hell bent on decreasing the world's dependence on the USA) are in for a shock over the next few years when the rest of the world realizes that the American market will be superceded by those in Asia.

 

Review: First Light - Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

 First Light is a book about how the first stars formed, and how they're quite different from our sun and the stars being formed today. I read it on a plane and it was relatively light and didn't keep me from napping when I needed to.

The earliest stars were formed when most of the universe was either Hydrogen or Helium. By definition there weren't other elements since those had yet to have been forged in the hearts of stars.What I enjoyed about this book is that it takes pains to reveal mysteries that we still don't understand:

It wasn’t until the 1930s that it was realised that this absorption line was not due to a new element at all, but was instead a different form of the already familiar element, iron. Iron usually has 26 electrons and is associated with a well-known set of absorption lines. If we take away some of those electrons (we ionise the iron), then those absorption lines change. The absorption line linked to the mythical element coronium was identical to the absorption line produced by an iron atom that has had 13 electrons removed. Removing electrons is no easy job and requires very high temperatures to create high-energy collisions capable of dislodging electrons. To remove 13 electrons requires blisteringly high temperatures, indicating that the corona is millions of degrees Kelvin compared to the comparatively chilly 5,800K photosphere. So the Sun does indeed get hotter as you venture into the corona, an entirely unintuitive situation. Perhaps the high temperatures are produced by complicated magnetic fields violently throwing charged particles up from the photosphere into the corona, or perhaps bomb-like explosions called nano-flares throw heat up into the atmosphere. The theories are being narrowed down, but the Coronal Heating Problem remains an unsolved quandary. * * * It might disappoint you that I haven’t been able to tie up the Coronal Heating Problem in a neat and satisfying way. It’s annoying not knowing the answer, isn’t it? And surprising considering the resources we command. We have built probes that have travelled all the way into interstellar space, and Hubble can see well outside the Milky Way to a multitude of other galaxies. We understand how our Universe evolved, even right back to having a solid theory for its creation, the Big Bang. Yet we still race to exploit every bit of scientific understanding we can from seven minutes of totality, just as scientists were doing in 1925, albeit now with more advanced technology. We add to our knowledge in one sense (the corona isn’t made of an unusual element – it’s just really hot!), then add to our questions in another (wait, how is it that hot?!). I will admit that the Coronal Heating Problem was fairly new to me at the time of the Great American Eclipse. As an astrophysicist studying the first stars, it hadn’t ever occurred to me to pay much attention to the nearest star – the mundane, predictable Sun. (kindle loc 406)

 The book describes how it's taken years and they've still not discovered a generation 1 star (one that has a very low percentage of non hydrogen/helium). That's because those very old stars were mostly very big and hence had a short lifespan. In addition, to look for those old stars you have to look back in time a long way,

Recommended

Review: There is no Antimemetics Division

 I bought There Is No Antimemetics Division thinking that I'd read it on a plane flight, but no such luck! As soon as I got a couple of chapters in, I just had to keep reading until I finished the novel.

The book is properly described as a Cthulhu Mythos horror, drawing from the same genre of horror about "unspeakables", "unmentionables", and other types of horror. But it's written by a software engineer, and so is rigorous and academic in ways that H. P. Lovecraft could never match.

Imagine a world in which there are creatures that are anti-memetic. A meme is an idea that wants to spread to as many people as possible. An anti-meme is something that wants to be a secret (for instance, your password is an anti-meme) These creatures would want humans to see past them, or to forget them if they ever glimpsed them, for either innocent or nefarious purposes.

Just like in Charlie Stross's laundry series, this novel is written around an organization that's been built to deal with anti-memetic creatures. How such an organization would operate, what tools and research methods it would use, are slowly revealed in the course of this novel. At first, the novel seems to be a collection of vignettes, or short stories about individual episodes in this setting. As the novel develops, however, you start to see a theme and see various holes in the organizations, along with certain mysteries. The writing is tight, fast paced (the book's only 267 pages long), and in many cases so many words are blacked out that it would be impossible for you to fill in the blanks! That's part of the book's structure.'

The book does have several holes. For instance, I cannot understand why you would have a recurrent/repeating meeting in an organization that has to deal with creatures that could erase your memory. That seems bad. For another, by the end of the novel, the author (Sam Hughes,aka qntm) has written himself into such a corner that the resolved ending feels lackluster and insufficient.

Nevertheless, the book is short, it's cheap, and the writing and plot are all well thought out and compelling. Highly recommended. Probably the best fiction I read all year!

Reread: Lord Valentine's Castle

 Humble bundle had a collection of Robert Silverberg's books on sale, and I had fond memories of Lord Valentine's Castle, so I bought them and started reading the book I had fond memories of. The book feels a bit cliche now, with an amnesiac protagonist wandering around and then getting picked up by a group of jugglers when he demonstrates talent juggling.

Over time, he discovers that he's the rightful ruler of the planet, via dreams. The rest of the book is his quest to be restored to his rightful position. The setting of the planet of Majipoor itself is a character, but we never get any explanation as to why the planet is so big but so density challenged (characters in the book do refer to the lack of heavy elements on Majipoor, so the author was aware of this), or how the planet got settled, or how the various mechanisms of population control work (how do dream sendings work, why did the society appear to lose all advanced technological knowledge).

The book does spend a lot of time on juggling, and it ends up being key to many scenes in the book. On the other hand, the battle sequences are lackluster and anti-climactic (very similar to The Sandman). I enjoyed the book (it's not one of those where it's no fun to read as an adult), and having 30 years or so between readings meant I did get surprised by many plot twists, including the one at the end when we discover who the villain was.

Regardless, it was a fun read and now I get to re-read all of Robert Silverberg's other books.

Re-read: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was the last book in the Millenium trilogy that Steig Larsson wrote before he died. The first book in the series was like a locked room mystery (though its setup was unlike any I'd seen). The second book started like a police procedural and ended up being a thriller. This last book started out like an espionage story, ran through the middle like a courtroom drama, and ended like a thriller. It's great, intense reading, and never fails to point to how women are treated even in Sweden, which to my mind is one of those Northern European countries that consistently seem to have it together.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl referred to in the title of all the books, plays a mostly passive role in the story. Picking up where everything left off in the second book, that's entirely reasonable, since there's only so much you can do while recovering from brain surgery. The plot revolves around her background, however, and all the events that led up to the first book are revealed. Blomkvist returns, and does behave a lot like the protagonist of the novel.

The book has aged quite a bit since 2010 when it came out. For one thing, back then, the United States still felt like a democracy where the rule of law mattered. Today, I would be very surprised if a novel came out with a sentence like this one:

Armansky had Blomkvist’s copy of Lidbom’s book An Assignment, and he was reading it with gathering astonishment. If this were the United States a dozen or so senior Säpo hands would have been arrested for obstruction of justice and forced to appear before a public committee in Congress. In Sweden apparently they were untouchable. (kindle loc 18671 in the kindle omnibus edition which is no longer sold!)

Nevertheless, the clue that the book is fiction is that everything ties up neatly, the bad guys are found (and revealed to be incompetent), and there's a happy ending of sorts. Like many franchises, this one sold too well to leave alone, and the publisher found another novelist to continue the adventures of Lisbeth Salander. A sample came with the book but after reading Larsson's writing it's clear that whoever followed him just doesn't have what it takes.

Re-read: The Girl Who Played With Fire

 I hadn't read The Girl Who Played With Fire for so long that it felt like a fresh novel. While the first book introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, this second book is her origin story. It's setup at first as a mystery novel, with a couple (who're introduced to us with sufficient detail to make us care and want to identify with them) who gets murdered early on, along with a character from the first novel (whom Salander has good reason to want to murder). There's a media circus that brings Salander to the public eye as a psychotic villain, and then we get what seems to be a police procedural novel about hunting down Salander.

Of course, from the first novel we know that she's a heroine (or maybe an anti-heroine), and while she's mostly missing from the first half of the novel when she's re-introduced to the narrative the pretense of a police procedural falls away and we get a full on thriller. The plot twists and turns are well done (including the reveal of who Salander's father is), and fair (i.e., I felt like there were plenty of clues and when the reveal happened I thought "oh wow, the clues were there all along")

The main character of this novel appears to be Mikahlle Blomvist, the journalist from the first novel, living like a private investigator. The book is full of references to that. I can see why this book took the world by storm when it was published. The only caveat I have is that the book ends with a cliffhanger/resolution that automatically leads into the third book of the series. Good thing I bought the series as a completed trilogy and can dive immediately into the third book!