Thoughts on the movie “The Nice Guys”

May 20, 2016 By Jake Seliger in movies Tags: '70s, cars, movies, the nice guys 3 Comments

* It’s charming: Charm is hard to define but easy to feel. The plot is ridiculous without being stupid, which is a more important distinction than it seems. Shane Black, the director, also did the underrated and forgotten Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In an age of Netflix and streaming, I’m surprised Kiss Kiss Bang Bang hasn’t been rediscovered.

* Like many caper movies (and books), The Nice Guys is about principled dirtbags, but observing life I’ve run into few, if any, principled dirtbags, and many unprincipled, standard-issue dirtbags. Shades of Elmore Leonard abound.

* One of the movie’s lessons may be, “Never lose your pistol.” But it’s not really a “lesson” movie.

* The Nice Guys‘s villain is unusual and unusually interesting, though not overstated or supernatural. You may be reminded of the second, not-very-good season of True Detective. But The Nice Guys gets tone as right as True Detective gets it wrong.

* The number of people who die in cars is amazing. Even today, around 30,000 people die annually in cars. You’d think this would lead to a transportation revolution and political outcry, but it doesn’t. About 3,000 people died, once, on 9/11. If the U.S. response to mass car death were proportional to the U.S. response to 9/11, we’d be living in a very different world.

* Seattle is now larger than Detroit, and Seattle isn’t even that big (this won’t make sense unless you’ve seen the movie).

* Were the ’70s as fun at the time as they’re now depicted in retrospect?

Briefly noted: Kindle Voyage

May 15, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Books, Reading, Tools Tags: Amazon, Kindle, kindle voyage 2 Comments

For a while I’ve had a Kindle Voyage. It’s functional and the screen is nice. Not much has changed since this 2010 post. Amazon still has no good system for organizing and sorting books, and Amazon doesn’t want you to use desktop computers and that shows in their whole ecosystem design.

The Voyage hardware is, at best, slightly better than the last Kindle iteration I used. Really, though, the improvements are so marginal that I can’t imagine anyone buying the new version unless their old one dies or is lost, as happened to me: Amazon will often knock some money off the new version if you ask them to “repair” the old version. To get the discount, Amazon requires that you send the broken Kindle to them. I don’t know what happens after that. Probably Amazon trashes it, but I’d like to imagine that it’s refurbished.

A lot about the Kindle Voyage is okay. There’s little to love. If you’re going to bother buy a Kindle the Voyage is a better choice than the regular Kindle Paperwhites because it has buttons, albeit buttons that aren’t as prominent or tactile as I’d like.

I don’t use the Kindle for books much, because I still prefer paper and Instapaper is my killer app. At the margins, I now read more nonfiction and fewer books in general, including novels. You’ve probably read or noticed that too many popular nonfiction books are just unsatisfactorily elongated articles. Preferring to read those rather than just clicking the “buy book” button is easier with Instapaper.

This review is thorough and says most of what I’d say. I don’t know how people produce many thousands of words in Kindle reviews. It’s a device without a personality. Which isn’t bad: It just is. There are good use cases for it, but not for me using it.

I still find button presses annoyingly too easy.

People can believe in madness for surprisingly long periods of time:

May 15, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Books, ideas, Nonfiction Tags: collective madness, madness, Politics, zero to one 1 Comment

I’m re-reading Zero to One, and one of its early points has surprising salience to politics right now. Collective madness is one of the book’s themes; Thiel notes that “Dot-com mania was intense but short—18 months of insanity from September 1998 to March 2000.” During that time, Thiel says he knew a “40-something rad student” who “was running six difference companies in 1999.” Yet:

Usually, it’s considered weird to be a 4o-year-old graduate student. Usually, it’s considered insane to start a half-dozen companies at once. But in the late ’90s, people could believe that was a winning combination.

That chapter, “Party Like It’s 1999,” starts with a quote from Nietzche: “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Is it so rare in individuals? I see people doing insane-seeming things all the time. Going to grad school in the humanities is one (I did that, by the way, although I at least had a well-developed backup plan). Continuing to date transparently bad people is another. Imagining the world to be a fundamentally stable place is a third, though one that has less immediate interpersonal relevance.

Still, the problem of collective insanity is a real one with lots of historical precedence. Hugo Chavez was originally elected fairly in Venezuela. Putin was originally elected fairly in Russia. Erdoğan was originally elected Prime Minister of Turkey fairly. In all three cases, the people spoke… wrongly. Horribly wrongly, and in ways that were at least somewhat clear at the time. Much as I hate to violate Godwin’s Law, the National Socialists were originally elected, or at least gained legitimate parliamentary seats. Mythologically, vampires must be invited into the home. The greatest danger is not the thing that should transparently be resisted. The greatest danger is the thing blithely accepted to the inner circle.

The U.S. has historically eschewed demagogues. Charles Lindergh never became president. Neither did Huey Long. The closest we’ve gotten in recent memory is Richard Nixon. The U.S. has historically eschewed outright incompetents too. But madness in groups, parties, and nations can persist for surprisingly long periods of time. It can be weirdly persistent, especially because, as Thiel argues implicitly throughout Zero to One, it’s very hard to really think for yourself. I’m not sure I do it well. There is a kind of Dunning-Kruger Effect for thinking for yourself.

That’s the context for why thinking people are scared about Trump as president. He’s manifestly unfit and unqualified, and yet it’s not uncommon for people to elect demagogic incompetents. Andrew Sullivan thinks we’ve never been as good a breeding ground for tyranny as we are now. That’s overstating the case—the 1930s were far more dangerous—but the argument itself is a reasonable one, and that itself is scary. We may be collectively partying like it’s 1999, and not in a good way.

I don’t write this from a partisan perspective or out of partisan animus. This blog rarely deal with direct political issues (though it often touches meta-politics). I’m politically disaffected; neither major party represents me or has the right ideas to move the country forward. Yet the recurrence of collective madness in history scares me. It should scare you too. The next American presidential election should, one hopes, deal such a terrific blow to the forces of madness that have taken over one party in particular that it is forced to re-constitute itself in the next four years.

Links: Literacy, novels, where jeans come from, the campus war on free speech, and more!

May 14, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Links Tags: batteries, EVs, Links Leave a comment

* Why suburbia sucks.

* “Are we sex-literate? Why we should all be writing more about pleasure.” Maybe.

* “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru: How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age,” a must-read for readers and writers, and much better than the title may imply. But see also this piece, on the many takedowns of the original piece; my interest is primarily literary, though.

* “How the Jeans Capital of the World Moved from Texas to China.” It is possible to buy jeans made in the U.S., Canada, or Japan, but they tend to be very expensive (e.g. Naked and Famous).

* “Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech.”

* Why Used Electric Car Batteries Could Be Crucial To A Clean Energy Future.

* Like so much else, you will not read “Too little too late: Sheryl Sandberg apologizes for Lean In” on Facebook. Sample: “When I wrote that post I got so many emails that requested confidentiality that said no one can say anything bad about her because Facebook controls the majority of traffic to media sites.”

* “Exploring the Elizabeth line, one of the world’s largest construction projects:” Crossrail is being in London.

* “The miserable French workplace,” which reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s observation that, if you think economics is a bad major, just try to talk to someone who doesn’t know any economics.

* “After LAUSD iPad program failure, Apple’s help spurs ‘success’ in other schools.”

Re-reading Cryptonomicon

May 13, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Books, Fiction Tags: Cryptonomicon, Fiction, Neal Stephenson, novels 1 Comment

It’s still excellent, and it’s so excellent that it’s one of the books I re-read when I can’t find anything good to read. The density of Cryptonomicon’s ideas and the strange (at first) construction of its plot makes it a particularly promising re-reading, since getting the full effect the first time through is almost impossible.

Cryptonomicon The novel is very fond of explaining things and so are its characters. “Things” seems like a vague, loose word here but it’s appropriate given the diversity of explanation. To list the topics that come up would be too tedious for this post but would be in keeping with the novel. Take one example, as a character explains startup financing in the ’90s:

We begin with nothing but the idea. That’s what the NDA is for—to protect your idea. We work on the idea together—put our brainpower to it—and get stock in return.

Except that, as we know now, ideas aren’t that important (the execution is important) and the best ideas are usually mocked at first. But the rest is pretty accurate, and the dialogue shows that the characters have ideas, share ideas, care about ideas, and fight over ideas. Ideas—actual ideas, as opposed to what many intellectuals think of as ideas—don’t appear often in novels. To the extent they do, ideas usually appear as grand abstractions tediously embodied in specific characters.

Skip some sections if they don’t speak to you the first time through; they may later, though the famous Cap’n’Crunch scene still does little for me, or to me.

Few books describe real nerd culture:

“You have jet lag now?” Goto asks brightly—following (Randy assumes) a script from an English textbook. He’s a handsome guy with a winning smile. He’s probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole different aging algorithm so this may be way off.
“No,” Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly, succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he were here, would use Goto’s question as it was intended—as an opening for cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it.

Conversation is a skill and it’s a skill most nerds don’t develop, which may be why they face troubles in dating. Nerds spend lots of time with machines and to some extent that time begins to shape their minds to think like machines.

The psychologies of innovators and deep thinkers may not be viable subjects for literary writers, or, if they are, I haven’t seen the fruit of those writers’ labor.

Most novels that are called “novels of ideas” are actually not. Finding a novel of ideas embedded congenially in a novel of intense action is unusual, especially when most novels of ideas are actually novels of navel gazing. Cryptonomicon also violates many of the rules one hears from MFA types and is useful for that reason: many “novels” are not actually novel.

Copies are available for $.01 on Amazon (which means $4 with shipping), and that’s a steal.

Links: Fiction and love and Bookslut, fusion power, weirdness as a personality trait, and more!

May 7, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Links Tags: Links Leave a comment

* “How fiction ruined love: Have representations of romance from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ ruined the real thing?” The piece is by Alain de Botton and is better than the title suggests.

* “‘I Just Don’t Find American Literature Interesting’: Lit-Blog Pioneer Jessa Crispin Closes Bookslut, Does Not Bite Tongue.” I like Bookslut.

* “Ted Cruz for Human President;” notice: “Ted Cruz is only one being and not several.”

* “Did This Couple Design the World’s Best Sex Toy?“, which is about more than its most salient, headline-forward point.

* The billionaire-backed plans to harness fusion; more good news.

* Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?” More interesting than it sounds:

A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this. But magic mushrooms apparently have this effect, and not subtly either; participants who had a mystical experience on psilocybin had Openness increase up to half a standard deviation compared to placebo, and the change was stable sixteen months later. This is really scary. I mean, I like Openness To Experience, but something that can produce large, permanent personality changes is so far beyond anything else we have in psychiatry that it’s kind of terrifying.

* Amtrak turns 45 today. Here’s why American passenger trains are so bad.

* Can SpaceX really land on Mars? Absolutely, says an engineer who would know.

* “There’s One Show That Could Fill All the Holes in Your TV Viewing: Penny Dreadful.” A show that oddly seems to get no press.

* “Economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight.”

Links: The color of money, social justice nonsense, the shape of the city, and more!

April 29, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Links Tags: Links, Money 1 Comment

* “When Bitcoin Grows Up,” which also covers what money is, what it might be, and the future of money.

* Parents Are Bankrupting Themselves to Look Adequate; or, more Theory of the Leisure Class. Or Max Weber. The drive to compete is hard to understate.

* “What the ‘Freedom’ of a Car Means to Me in a City Where Everyone Drives: Compared to the subway I was used to, driving in Seattle was freeing—but it was also lonely.”

* “The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them,” which makes sense and is compatible with my argument in “The race to the bottom of victimhood and ‘social justice’ culture.”

* Obvious, but: “National HPV vaccination program would provide big benefits.” I have a jones for the good news that gets overlooked.

* “Trains in space,” a more interesting piece than you’re imagining.

* Fantastic news: SpaceX undercut ULA rocket launch pricing by 40 percent: U.S. Air Force.

* “Unnatural Selection: What will it take to save the world’s reefs and forests?“

Briefly noted: Leviathan Wakes — James S. A. Corey

April 28, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Books, Fiction, Reviews, SF/Fantasy Tags: james s. a. corey, leviathan wakes, review, Reviews, SF Leave a comment

Leviathan Wakes is defiantly, definitely okay; the biggest problem with it isn’t the novel itself but having already read Blindsight, which its some similar notes but is just a much, much better novel.

Leviathan Wakes is big on game theory, empathy, and political questions. They start early—”The temptation to have an unexplained comm failure, erase the logs, and let the great god Darwin have his way was always there” happens on page 14—and don’t really relent. Still, I dislike the implication that “the great god Darwin” thinks that individuals and small groups are inwardly selfish; evolution has also endowed us with the ability to cooperate, and humans are super-cooperators, alone among animals.

Leviathan_Wakes But the divisions among people may change shape and form, but they always remain, at least as long as we live in a world of economic scarcity. In Leviathan Wakes, Earthers, Martians, and Belters (those who grow up and/or live in the Asteroid Belt) are the primary divisions. I write this in 2016, and in the current European and American political systems there are spasms around divisions that, viewed from the proper perspective, will seem trivial. The other day I heard someone say that Trump has a point about immigrants. I agreed and amplified, suggesting that he do something about the filthy, lazy Irish and Italians, with their Papist ways and mooching dispositions. The guy I was talking to didn’t know what to do with that; the Know Nothing Party may be gone, but its ideas live on for as long as humans have a powerful psychological need to divide ourselves into tribes.

In Leviathan Wakes some descriptions are good (on a space station, “The air smelled beery with old protein yeast and mushrooms” or “The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve”), but the text can usually be described as nondescript. It’s rarely bad but rarely stellar. For example, the sentence after the one about the circle of life on Ceres is “He liked it that way,” which is representative of the novel’s language.

The sense of mystery is strong, though, and mostly excuses the sentences. You’ve read worse. You’ve read better. The plot gets sillier as the novel progresses.

What else? There is a convenient magic drive that gets people from place to place relatively rapidly. It’s hard to imagine that genetic engineering won’t have re-made the human species by the time we develop advanced space stations with room for millions of people. Did people in 1750 imagine that in 2000 we’d still be riding horses and firing muskets? Because imagining 2250 without substantial genetic engineering is hard (unless there’s an apocalypse in the meantime, which is also possible).

Leviathan Wakes is guilty of many of Charlie Stross’s space opera clichés, but I mostly forgive it. I just can’t imagine wanting to re-read it.

Thoughts on Starz’s “The Girlfriend Experience”

April 20, 2016 By Jake Seliger in movies Tags: gfe, starz, the girlfriend experience, TV 1 Comment

* No one in the show evinces any enthusiasm. If I pitched clients with anything like the affect of the lawyers at the firm where Christine / Chelsea works, we’d have no clients. I don’t have any direct experience with the The Girlfriend Experience world, but I gather that escorts or hookers or whatever you want to call them are fundamentally selling people skills. In the show everyone is unbelievably uncomfortable with each other. Chelsea does say, “I don’t have any friends.” That’s believable. Distressingly believable. For her, there seems to be no there, there.

Girlfriend_Experience * There is almost no humor in the show, yet to my mind the situation is more humorous than dramatic. One sees a little humor in the episode when Chelsea / Christine says to her boss that she has a few clients, “including you.” The implications of that moment are rich, but there are too few such moments. Christine says that their relationship has “always been business.” Where does business end and personal begin? Does it ever?

* The spatial arrangements of The Girlfriend Experience are consistently interesting and revealing. But a show that starts out realistic-seeming and somewhat plausible becomes more and more baroque, ridiculous, soap-operatic, and ludicrous.

* I know it’s annoying when cops say cop shows are bogus and doctors say doctor shows are bogus, but in The Girlfriend Experience none of the lawyers seem to have specialties or areas of expertise (early in the series the firm consists of patent attorneys; later on, they do law far removed from that field). The scenes detailing law are weirdly generic and surface-feeling. The characters speak in word salad. There is no content to go with the form. I work in a field that is not law but is sufficiently adjacent to it to recognize total bullshit. The law discussions are unconvincing. In the real world real issues get discussed in depth by real people. Cryptonomicon depicts this convincingly in fiction. The Girlfriend Experience has a sprinkling of law talk.

* Maybe in the above bullets I’m small-minded and missing the point. The point is not about a realistic lawyer show. The point is about the acts. I will say that some of the foreplay or roleplay talk between lawyer / intern is plausible. Very plausible.

* It’s refreshing to see a woman shown as aggressive in a non-stupid way. Being hardcore is also underrated, and very few TV shows or movie depict being hardcore. Unreal does, which is one of the refreshing and admirable parts of it.

* For someone who is attempting to be a lawyer, Christine / Chelsea does not think very many moves ahead. I’ll avoid real spoilers and just say that episode 11 has to have any actual lawyer rolling their eyes. Her liking sex isn’t what should preclude her from being a lawyer; her being a terrible strategist for herself should.

* The TV show is oddly congruent with the movie Her.

* The protagonist sounds perpetually unconvincing. Maybe that’s intentional. Actually, it almost has to be intentional.

* Being fond of risk in erotic situations makes sense, but the level of risk Christine / Chelsea seeks is probably incompatible with a law firm internship. She’d be more believable as a hacker, in Paul Graham’s sense of the word, since that field is unusually open, unusually unencumbered by unfair occupational licensing, and unusually merit-driven. Law is none of those things. By now, six months in a coding school like the Flatiron School makes more sense than three years in law school. Maybe coding is less attractive because hackers rarely directly fuck with people’s lives the way lawyers sometimes do, but it is a more intelligent occupation for someone with Christine / Chelsea’s appetite for risk.

Hackers, though, are involved in a positive-sum world, rather than the lawyer’s zero-sum world. If you want ennui and anomie, law and management consulting are hard fields to beat. The hacker’s fundamental ethos is to make something new and make something people want. The lawyer’s fundamental ethos is to fight like hell and beat the other guy. The resonances are very different (and they are yet another reason not to go to law school).

* In the bullet above, I’m not knocking risk-seeking or risk-taking or being into stuff that other people don’t understand. I’m also not knocking Christine / Chelsea’s occupation or bifurcated life. Her occupation probably produces more value than many lawyers produce, and that value is more easily measurable in money than law is.

* Victimhood culture is out of control in the United States. We we already know that, but it’s unusual to see it confirmed on TV.

* In contemporary relationships there is a game-theory dynamic in which the person who cares less has control, or power, or “hand.” But following that dynamic to its logical conclusion seems like a crappy way to live, even if superficially rational actors might pursue it. Given the University of Chicago’s role in economics, law, and economics in law, it may not be a coincidence that the show is set there, instead of somewhere cooler like New York, Austin, or Seattle.

Then again, sometimes renting is better than buying.

* How often are people who accuse others of selfishness selfish themselves?

* The show gets better as it goes on. But: The ending? Of the first season? I’m reminded of the debates around the final, series-ending episode of The Sopranos.

* The Girlfriend Experience is also about technology. The Technology and Law Marketing Blog hits the same intersection between law and technology.

* Despite the critical tenor of the above points I’m glad I watched the show. This is one ecstatic review; others may be found. The Girlfriend Experience isn’t stupid, and “not stupid” is distressingly uncommon characteristic. It also doesn’t feel like it’s a following a Save the Cat-style formula. It’s more willing to be weird and awkward than many TV shows or movies, which is a great, rare virtue. It’s not for everyone. That makes it more likely to be for someone.