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.

 

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: Voice of the Whirlwind

 I’m generally a fan of Walter Jon Williams. His worlds are quite well constructed, and his characters interesting, many quite nuanced. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in his Cyberpunk universe. The protagonist, Steward, is a highly trained super soldier fanatic who’s brought back to life after his Alpha (the original) died. Apparently, the brain backups weren’t made frequently, so he has a memory gap and has to figured out what his Alpha was up to when he died.

If this sounds very familiar, it’s because Richard Morgan’s much more successful Altered Carbon had a similar setup. What made Morgan’s book more successful? First, Takeshi Kovacs narrates the novel, which makes the entire voice and presence much more immediate and visceral. Secondly, Morgan’s style is much better: rather than trying to be cyberpunk, Morgan went for a Raymond Chandler cynical hardboiled attitude.

Finally, while Stewart seems devoice of passion, Kovacs is nothing if not passionate, even if cynical.

The world that Williams introduces is complex, but there’s a lot of explicit exposition that has to happen for you to “get it.” The initial setup takes too long, and while the action goes fast once Stewartd figures out what happened, because of the third person narrative, you never understand why he should have cared in the first place.

To be fair, Williams wrote this book many years before Richard Morgan wrote Altered Carbon. I think it suffered from too much cyberpunk and its datedness shows.

 

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!

Review: Frieren Vol 11-14

 Going into Frieren Vol 11 I finally got to the point where Macht is killed and the heroes are victorious over a "midas touch" demon as well as Solitar. We then go into an extended time travel sequence where Frieren swaps places with herself from prior to the series beginning (i.e., during the quest to destroy the Demon King), and gets to use her knowledge from the future to help her previous party overcome immediate challenges while they help her return to the future.

I thought this was a great sequence, and well setup to see both how much and how little Frieren herself has changed over time.

Unfortunately, the series came to a hiatus after Vol 14, while ending in a particularly bad place with the shadow assassins plotline coming together. The problem with Japanese Manga is that they're high on filler (lots of pages where nothing essentially happens) and so by the time you get substantial events you're 14 volumes into a series that wasn't finished. The characters also have a tendency to pontificate about their secret techniques while fighting, which is pretty unrealistic but I guess with manga there's no other way to get to know the characters' innermost thoughts!

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.

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 6-10

 I kept checking out Frieren - Beyond Journey's End from the library, even though the books are quite slow moving, and sometimes the writer seems to have written himself into a corner. Getting to the end of the "Class 1 Mage" saga, the author seemed to change his mind on having a Battle Royale type reality show face-off and had each candidate interviewed by the master wizardess (who's an elf who knows Frieren). The decisions seem purely arbitrary, but at least it gets the story moving.

We get a continuation of the journey across the continent, with a bunch of side quests, but the story becomes more interesting as we see Frieren in action against demons, and an explanation that demons are completely a different type of sentient being with no emotions but seemingly evolved to prey on humans. That's interesting, but no explanation on the origins is forthcoming. As always, humans get the short end of the stick --- they don't live long enough, and all the non-humans are immortal. Makes you wonder how humans came to dominate the world, since according to the explication in the books, living longer accumulates magical energy (mana).

Finally, we get a long story arc about a demon that turns things into gold via a midas touch like spell. By the end of the 10th volume things still aren't resolved. We reach a climax where things have gone maximally bad for the heroes when the volume ends, keeping you wanting to reach for the next book.

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!

Review: The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions

 The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions showed up in my kindle library, probably because another family member checked it out from the local library. I read it in a handful of days because it was relatively easy to read (no equations), and mostly covered stuff I already knew, from Newton to Einstein to Hubble to the Big Bang Theory.

Towards the end of the book, as she discusses the Big Bang theory, I started getting into stuff I either didn't know or didn't remember, such as the origins of Inflation, and the confirmation that the Big Bang Theory is correct mostly because of the proportion of the light elements that are present in the universe.

Helium, deuterium, and lithium nuclei are formed. The cosmic quantities of these elements are set, along with that of hydrogen, whose density has decreased as a result of the formation of helium. If we were to calculate how many of these elements were produced by nucleosynthesis, we would find astonishing results. The mass ratio between hydrogen and helium that we still observe in the Universe today is exactly that established in those first 3 minutes. For every three hydrogen atoms, there is one helium atom. This is one of the most surprising confirmations of the Big Bang theory. Without primordial nucleosynthesis, the amount of helium we observe in the Universe today could not be explained. (kindle loc 1218)

Cosmology is great fun, because it's astonishing how much we've been able to discover about the universe from mostly being Earthbound, and the astonishing idea that so much of what we know about the expanding universe will become unknowable in the far future, once the last external galaxy has been expanded out of our light cone.  We truly live in interesting times!