ReMarkable

Here’s Corey Doctorow’s blurb on the front cover: “A hymn to the ‘deep state,’ which is revealed as nothing more than people who know what they’re talking about.” That pretty much sums things up.

As anti-government sentiment has grown unchecked over the decades, especially among conservative circles, the narrative of government being comprised exclusively of bumbling, inept dolts has become the narrative of choice.

Here’s my take on government: I don’t care if my government is big or if my government is small, I just want it to be smart and effective. My sense is that the current right-wing of America just wants their government to be small and doesn’t care how effective it is in dealing with problems that only governments can deal with. This strikes me as short-sighted and self-defeating.

Case in point: on the morning of November 9, 2016 (the day after Trump’s election), the people in charge of running the U.S. Department of Energy showed up to work fully expecting a team from the Trump transition team to arrive and get briefed on the department’s most pressing issues. By the afternoon, there was still no word. Same with all of Day 2.

Two weeks after the election, DOE staffers read in the newspaper that a small “DOE Landing Team” had been created to handle the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration.

A month after the election, one guy (Thomas Pyle, lobbyist for Koch Industries) showed up for a briefing. He stayed for an hour. He took no notes. He asked no questions. He never showed up again.

The DOE is a $30 billion a year operation in charge of a whole bunch of stuff. Important stuff like safeguarding our nuclear arsenal. That alone takes up about half the DOE budget. $2 billion goes to tracking down weapons grade plutonium and uranium that is floating around the world. Between 2010 – 2018, the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to construct 160 bombs. Given our deep, unrelenting fear of terrorism, this seems like a worthwhile investment…

By Inauguration Day, the Trump Administration’s primary interaction with the DOE was to clear it of all Obama appointees. While that’s not that surprising, there is a long history of appointees from one administration staying on well into the next to provide continuity and training to the incoming team. The Bush Administration’s DOE CFO stayed on for a year and a half into the Obama administration because he had a detailed understanding of the DOE’s finances that was hard to replace on a whim.

Joe Hezir, the DOE’s CFO at the end of Obama’s term, was widely respected across the political spectrum. He assumed he would be getting a call from the incoming Trump team asking him to stay on. By Inauguration Day, no such call had arrived. Not knowing what else to do, the CFO of a $30 billion organization packed up his office and left. With no replacement in sight.

The underlying thread of the anecdotes like the above are a disdain for the work done by government employees.

There’s the guy who spent his career working for the Coast Guard and developed a model to predict how fast and how far kayaks and lifeboats and capsized sailboats and people in water with life vests and people in water without life vests, etc., etc., would float given various wind and water current patterns in the ocean. His work dramatically improved the success rates of search and rescue efforts at sea. This is the work of government, not private enterprise. Trump’s answer: cut research funding.

There’s the guy who spent his career at NOAA fine-tuning tornado predictions, saving untold lives throughout the Midwest. This is the work of government, not private enterprise. Trump’s answer: appoint the CEO of Accuweather to run (and defund) NOAA so that publicly gathered weather data would only be available to Accuweather’s paying clients.

And so on. And so on.

When people in government have a vested interest in tearing down and denigrating government because it fits a narrative, that narrative can become a self-fulling prophecy. Why didn’t the government protect me from a rogue nuclear attack? Or a coronavirus outbreak? Well… it might be because the people responsible for keeping such events from happening are political hacks who show up to their government jobs with an ideological focus on tearing down those very governmental functions rather than a focus of serving the public.

Grr. Tax dollars at work, indeed.

Looking for a copy? Track it down here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1132234996

Side note: Sorry all, I thought I had posted this several months ago but it was actually just stuck in a draft version. Whoops. Better late than never.

Sometime in the fall of 2019, I was enjoying a round of disc golf with a good friend. This friend — let’s just call him Kevin — also happens to be a history professor at Gonzaga University. After some discussion of the horrors of the day laid out by my federal government, I commented that the history classes that I’ve taken in the past (or the history books I’ve read) tend to lay out the historical record in a very linear, causational manner: A lead to B, which then obviously lead to C, and so on.

The problem we face as we live through what will one day be referred to as “history” is that it is hard to see where things are headed. It’s hard to know when to roll my eyes versus pack my bags and get my family the hell out of the country. I’m sure millions of Jews wished for the same clarity and the ability to accurately assess just how bad things were in the early 1930’s.

Stemming from that line of thought, I asked Kevin if he had any book recommendations to help identify and magnify the warning signs of a culture drifting into psychopathic behavior and authoritarian rule. The immediate recommendation was On Tyranny by Tim Snyder.

Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, has a deep background and depth of knowledge in twentieth century European history, specifically German and Russian history. You know, Holocaust stuff. The guy knows his subject when it comes to discussing authoritarian regimes. This base of knowledge allows him to be succinct and to the point with his observations. Clocking in at all of 126 pages, On Tyranny gives twenty warning signs for citizens to pay attention to. Things like believe in truth (if nothing is true then there is no basis on which to criticize those in power), listen for dangerous words (extremism, terrorism, emergency and exception are often followed by demands for curtailed liberties), stand out (it is easy to follow along; it can feel strange to do or say something different but without that unease, there is no freedom). And so on.

Five stars for this one. Well-written, short and important. What else could you want in a book? Go track down a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/990509806

Other than his well-know Lord of the Flies novel, who knew that William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature way back in 1983? Huh… not this guy.

At any rate, I came across a mention of this book while reading Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It is one of a handful of books that Kingsnorth could think of where the natural world played a leading character role in a work of fiction. Pincher Martin, written two or three years after Lord of the Flies, flows from a pretty similar premise as Lord of the Flies: a guy is stranded on a small crag of an island in the middle of the north Atlantic. The difference is that instead of a group of boys devolving into a cutthroat mob, it’s just one guy alone on a rock.

I won’t give any spoilers about how it all works out for Pincher but I will say that I ended up not really giving a damn about the fate of the guy. He’s kind of an ass. But whether it was intentional or not, the story of a human on a rock floating in space and trying to bend the rock to his will reflects the larger story of all of humanity: we’re stuck on a rock floating in space and the sooner we figure out that there are limits to what the rock can provide, the ending of our tale may be a happier one.

Giving this three-stars only because who wants to spend a couple hundred pages with the inner thoughts of a jerk? But still, worth the read. Go find a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/910928524

 

Let’s say you’re a large, institutional investor in charge of growing the funds of thousands and thousands of retirement accounts. Now let’s say you think that XYZ, Inc. is poised for great growth in the coming years. Acting on that, you place an order with your broker to buy 25,000 shares of XYZ, Inc.

So far, so good. But what can happen next blows my mind.

Your stock broker see that shares of XYZ are available for purchase at $50.00 per share. The order goes in to a stock exchange, of which there a currently 23 scattered around the nation, and then things get weird. High-frequency trading (HFT) firms see the order come in and before your order can be completed, they race ahead to the other exchanges and buy up the available shares of XYZ, driving the price up. Now, instead of paying $50.00 per share, you need to pay $50.01 per share. The HFT firms are happy to sell to their shares back to you at this inflated price after buying up the stock at $50.00 per share. This all happens within a span of milliseconds, or about one one-thousandth of the time it takes to blink your eye.

This is the story of how HFT firms make billions of dollars per year by placing bets they can’t lose. And it’s the story of banks knowingly working against the best interests of their customers as they get kickbacks from the HFT firms as they give them a special vantage point that isn’t available to the general public.

That’s the downside.

The upside is that — gasp! — there are ethical people on Wall Street, one of them being Brad Katsuyama. After spending years working at the Royal Bank of Canada trying to figure out why his trades routinely cost him more than he thought they should, he figured out that if he could get his orders to land on each exchange at the exact same time, he could buy and sell at the prices he anticipated. If the order only went to one exchange or landed at different times (again, measured in fractions of seconds) the HFT traders would outrace him to the better deal. Katsuyama pulled together a rogue team of Wall Street traders, coders, tech geeks and created an entirely new stock exchange — Investors Exchange (IEX) — expressly built to level the playing field and negate systematic advantages conferred upon any particular group of traders.

So while there is hope for transparency and fairness in the trading world, IEX currently controls only about 3% of the market share. Oof.

Well worth the read. 4 stars. Go find a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/965121985