“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
One of those mornings when I have so much to talk about that I don't know what to say.
Peg's blissfully sleeping down the hall, enjoying her first of several mornings without a strict wakeup. Later we'll pack, and I'll fly the Columbia over to Binghamton for its annual inspection mandated by the FAA. I'm hoping he doesn't find much wrong, because I need the plane back when we return from vacation for my long commute back-and-forth to Florida.
I opened my computer to a couple squawks from clients about letters that were supposed to go to them in draft, but apparently were just mailed out and copied to them. Every day brings this sort of thing. I wonder at times how much further I could have gone professionally if I'd lived in a place with a better labor pool. The road not taken.
I am trying not to give much thought to Russia's threats yesterday to attack the UK with nuclear weapons, seeing as how we'll be in London on Saturday. Russia's gone mad, and its crime family government threatens to take humanity down the tube with it as the Russians reveal their true selves in Ukraine. Mass executions, sexual violence, executing prisoners--these are really bad folks, behaving like a less disciplined version of the Wehrmacht when it swept across those same steppes eighty years ago. The residents seem unable to catch a break.
And now there's hand-wringing because they've cut off oil to a couple NATO countries. This latest move, and the fact that Russia has actually made more money on oil exports since the war started, simply underscores that our stupid reliance on fossil fuel has created this nuclear-armed monster. Go ahead and name one petro-state that isn't a dumpster fire politically and socially. Take your time. I'll wait.
A wag might argue the United States could be classed as such, but I'm talking about countries that built their entire economy around the export of oil. We're more diverse than that, or maybe we'd have ended up no better than Venezuela, Russia, or Iran.
But how much better are we, really? Kevin McCarthy gets a standing O from the House Republican Caucus yesterday--for lying to the press, being revealed a liar when the tape of his conversation emerged (in which he made the mistake of expressing an honest desire that DJT resign after inciting the insurrection), then engaging in a groveling display of pressing his forehead to the carpet and expressing his love of and loyalty to the Donald. And these bastards will likely be running the country in a few months. That is, if their Dear Leader's favorite foreign ruler doesn't nuke us first.
If one were apt to despair, today would present ample invitation.
But instead I'd like to slip into the old man's lament, and admit there are a lot of things I simply don't understand. Like NFTs. Or Bitcoin. Try as I might, I just can't get my arms around how these things have any actual value, and trust me I've tried.
Now the Times is writing about special summer camps and activities to introduce three-year-olds to this brave new world.
Of course, even as I write this, I call myself up short on the notion that something has "value", which is a mostly subjective notion, isn't it? McKay wrote about the mad rush to invest in tulips in seventeenth century Europe, painting a scene that resonates to the present:
“A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip-marts, like flies around a honey-pot . . . Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips.”
People don't change. I bet their explanation for why they dumped their life savings into bulbs made as much sense to them as the bitcoin craze has to our generation.
Or yours. Mine doesn't really get it, although a few have gotten quite rich off a shed full of servers until the computing power required to solve the riddle and create value became so massive it is starting to heat up Seneca Lake.
It all makes as much sense to me as the business plan of the Gnomes who were merrily stealing Tweek's underpants.
Oh, I bet you weren't a South Park junkie in the last '90s. Boy, I was, rarely missing an episode. They were really good back then.
And one of my favorites was entitled "Gnomes", really about the hypocritical posturing of some Americans against corporate juggernauts as they squeeze out the mom-n-pops of the world. The subplot, from which the episode derives its title, presents us with poor Tweek watching teams of gnomes crawl into his dresser at night, emerging with underpants that they steal and take to their underground lair. At first only Tweek can see them, drawing him a fair amount of grief from his parents and classmates for his ranting about these little beings who keep stealing his tightie whities.
The boys find themselves on a quest to learn how business works, and at Tweek's house they encounter the gnomes going about their task of pilfering undies and realize Tweek wasn't making them up. When asked why they engage in this nightly act of theft, one gnome explains simply, "Underpants big business." Then the boys follow the gnomes to their lair, where they receive a presentation on the gnomes' business model:
There is no Phase Two. There is no logical plan to turn underpants into profit. It is the ultimate QED to skip the tough task of providing a rational explanation for all this wealth that will flow from a pile of slightly used cotton undies.
Bitcoin and NFTs strike me that way, but in reality it doesn't have to make sense to me. If someone is willing to bid up the price of something, whether it's a precious metal you can't eat or a piece of art that looks a lot like a cross immersed in a beaker of urine, it has value simply by virtue of the fact that the buyer exists. That's all the reasoning one needs, I guess, and the fact that I won't come near it until I understand it, and I'll never really understand it, explains why I have to go toil in the vineyards every day.
But for now I need to go take care of P, who's suffering after yesterday's Covid booster, and pack for the trip. It's shaping up to be a beautiful day for a short flight and a long drive.
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