Category: Travel
My Conversation with the excellent Patrick McKenzie
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Patrick to discuss signature fields on the back of credit cards, whether bank tellers or waitstaff are more trustworthy, the gremlins behind spurious credit card declines, how debt collection and maple syrup heists should change your model of the world, Twitter’s continued success as the message bus for government and civil society, crypto vs traditional money transfers, the intended desolation of bank parking lots, why he moved to Japan and how it affected his ambition, why Tether hasn’t collapsed, the internet as a Great Work, how he’s experiencing reverse culture shock after returning to the US, what he’ll learn about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: How did the maple syrup heists change your overall view of the world and of humanity? What’s the model update?
MCKENZIE: Going back to “evil is an actual thing in the world,” I often assume that large, well-regarded, professionalized industries have a rate of crime associated with them which rounds to zero. I would assume agriculture is relatively heavily regulated. Maple syrup is an agricultural product. The only buyers of maple syrup by the containerful are “real companies.” Therefore, I would expect rounds-to-zero supply-chain fraud in maple syrup.
But it turns out that the amount of supply-chain fraud in maple syrup is actually quite higher than zero. The chain of custody for cars of maple syrup is much less regimented than you would expect that chain of custody to be. There are smaller buyers of maple syrup — not on the scale of you or me, but on the scales like a boutique maple syrup refinery — who just don’t do as many checks as the large producers or suppliers, et cetera, do. So, it is possible to steal millions of dollars of maple syrup and sell it on the black market, which blew my mind.
This rhymes with how Tide, the well-known detergent in the United States, is used as a commodity on the criminal and semi-criminal/system deal, less criminal undergrounds, in that Tide can be resold. Online marketplaces are getting a lot of the attention, but the traditional way to use Tide as a currency for people who have less access to dollars was to resell the Tide to a corner bodega.
Since the corner bodega can easily verify that the Tide hasn’t been tampered with because the Tide seal is on it, and has basically unlimited willingness to do small-dollar transactions that make money, that was a way to recycle Tide which had been stolen — or which had been acquired by means that were not stealing, but also not exactly the official way of getting Tide — and recycle it into the more or less legitimate economy, insofar as we think that the corner bodega is more or less legitimate, which I think is a complicated story.
And:
COWEN: Why are bank parking lots usually so empty?
MCKENZIE: Oh, this is a straightforward result from queuing theory, if you can believe it. Queuing theory/operation science, by the way, tremendously under-understood by many people to whom it is professionally relevant, be that as it may. When you think of your typical stop-in at a bank, you go in, perhaps you deposit a check, perhaps you talk to the teller. You probably think, “I will have three minutes of dwell time.” So, you expect to be in and out. But the thing that the bank really wants to optimize for is new account opening.
New account opening requires 30 to 60 minutes plus of dwell time, depending on what type of account you are opening. Then when you back out that variability, it turns out that gratuitously over-provisioning the parking space almost all of the time maximizes for not losing new account opening at a few very limited windows per year. Those very limited windows can make or break the branch’s ability to contribute to their larger financial institution.
The number of accounts a bank actually opens per year in terms of checking accounts per branch — that is a number that one can have access to in various places. Depending on the bank and the locality, et cetera, it’s between 200 and 500. So, if you turn away a single customer or two customers in a row to open accounts because you had three parking spaces where you could have had seven, you’ve done a very outsized amount of damage to your financial institution, and thus over-provision the parking in all the places.
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout.
Are cities for tourists or residents?
And at what margin?
A new ideological struggle is brewing, yet we have not yet recognized it as such. The question is to what extent cities are for tourists, or for their current residents. Here is a report from Vermont:
A Vermont town known for its autumn foliage has closed its roads to the public for the season, citing an overwhelming amount of influencer tourists.
The select board of Pomfret voted to close Cloudland Road and Barber Hill Road to non-residents from Sept. 23 to Oct. 15. That also blocks access to the popular Sleepy Hollow Farm, a private residence that many tourists try to visit.
New York City has placed severe restrictions on AirBnb, causing hotel room prices to skyrocket. Here is more from Jerusalem Demsas.
Amsterdam has sent out warnings, designed to discourage British tourists from visiting the city for sex, drugs, and drink.
As for the Continent, The Times of London reports:
Beaches, restaurants and estate agents have been attacked by radical anti-tourism groups throughout mainland Spain and the Balearic islands this summer…Flares were let off in restaurants, tourists’ bike tyres were slashed and hooded activists besieged a sightseeing bus.
Venice may be charging day trippers five euros a pop, and I’ve seen calls for raising that price by 5x or more. That is one set of obstacles that probably makes sense, due to congestion and wear and tear on the city itself.
Cruise ships are becoming less popular at many places around the world. How about this from Florida? (NYT):
Activists flooded City Commission meetings, protested on the dock, collected signatures and managed to pass three ballot measures in 2020 imposing stricter controls to protect the marine environment and limit [cruise ship] passengers to 1,500 a day…
Maybe this one is a coincidence, but Japan is hiking the price of its bullet train pass for tourists by seventy percent.
China is schizophrenic on tourism, on one hand easing visa requirements but on the other managing payments in the country isn’t getting easier.
Obviously the right answers here are on a case-by-case basis. But political economy tells us that chosen policies will tend to overemphasize the interests of the voting residents, and underemphasize the interests of the visitors.
Plenty of these anti-tourist stories are making the news, but we’ve yet to see this part of a more systemic pattern. And that pattern is going to intensify, if only because voters are aging, nationalism is ascendant, and protectionist sentiment is on the rise.
I am also pleased to tell you all that the world is full of underexplored spots — try Salta or Kosovo for a start. Or in a major, heavily-touristed city of your choice, just walk ten or fifteen minutes away from the beaten track, if that.
It is snobby and elitist and self-satisfying to speak up against tourism, but in the future we will need a movement to defend the practice.
The cities meme
This is making the rounds on Twitter, so I thought I would serve up my somewhat unusual, not quite playing the game by its rules answers:
City I hate: Do I hate any cities? I don’t think so. I do recall being disappointed in Invercargill, New Zealand. I expected a cool, end of the earth vibe, but it was mainly a boring dump. Probably it has improved. Can I even call it a city?
City I think is overrated: Isn’t almost everything good underrated? But perhaps I am disillusioned with Milan.
City I think is underrated: By outsiders? Los Angeles. Residents however pay a lot to live there.
City I like: Busan
City I love: Berlin, Singapore, London
City I feel most myself in: Fairfax County
City I still need to visit: Capetown, Bordeaux, Vilnius, Caracas, Santiago, Cuba, and Tblisi. Muscat too.
City I dream of living in: Fairfax County
My Conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, conducted over a long meal at Mama Chang restaurant in Fairfax. Here is the episode summary:
As they dined, the group discussed why the diversity in Chinese cuisine is still only just being appreciated in the West, how far back our understanding of it goes, how it’s represented in the Caribbean and Ireland, whether technique trumps quality of ingredients, why certain cuisines can spread internationally with higher fidelity, what we can learn from the different styles in Indian and Chinese cooking, why several dishes on the table featured Amish ingredients, the most likely mistake people will make when making a stir fry, what Lydia has learned managing an empire of Chinese restaurants, Fuchsia’s trick for getting unstuck while writing, and more.
Joining Tyler, Fuchsia, and Lydia around the table were Dan Wang, Rasheed Griffith, Fergus McCullough, and Sam Enright.
Here is one excerpt:
WANG: Yes, that’s right. If I can ask a follow-up question on this comparison between India and China. Maybe this is half a question also for Tyler. Why do we associate Indian cuisine so much more with long simmers, whereas Chinese cuisine — of course, it is a little bit of everything, as Fuchsia knows so well, but it is often a little bit more associated with quick fries. What is the factor endowment here of these two very big countries, very big civilizations having somewhat divergent paths, as we imagine, with culinary traditions?
DUNLOP: That’s a really interesting question. It’s hard to answer because I don’t really know anything about Indian food. I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian who came on my tour to Yunnan earlier this year because I was speculating that one of the reasons that Chinese food is so diverse is that the Chinese are really open-minded, with very few taboos. Apart from Muslims eating halal food and some Buddhists not eating meat, there’s a great adventurous open-mindedness to eating.
Whereas in India, you have lots of taboos and religious and ritual restrictions. That’s one reason that you would think it would be a constraint on the creativity of Indian food. But this Indian I was talking to, who’s a food specialist — he reckoned that the restrictions actually forced people to be more creative. He was arguing that Indian food had all the conditions for diversity that Chinese does.
In terms of cooking methods, it’s hard to say. Again, I don’t know about Indian food, but the thing about China is that there’s been this intense thoughtfulness about food, really, for a very long time. You see it in descriptions of food from 2,000 years ago and more.
In the Song Dynasty, this incredible restaurant industry in places like Hangzhou, and innovation and creativity. I suppose that when you are thoroughly interested in food like the Chinese and thinking about it creatively all the time, you end up having a whole plethora of different cooking methods. That’s one of the striking things about Chinese cuisine, that you have slow-cooked stews and simmered things and steamed things and also stir-frying. That might explain why several different methods have achieved prominence.
COWEN: Before I comment on that, Lydia, on the new dish, please tell us.
The dishes are explained as they were consumed, the meal was excellent, of course the company too. A very good episode, highly rated for all lovers of Chinese food. And here is Fuchsia’s new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, self-recommending. And here are previous MR mentions of Fuchsia, including links to my two earlier CWTs with her.
Space Tourism Revisited, Again
One of the advantages of writing a blog for 20 years is that you get a feel for what is new and for what seems new but is actually old. Space tourism falls into the latter category. I wrote my first piece on space tourism in 2004 when Burt Rutan was predicting 100,000 space tourists annually in 10 years. In contrast, I argued that rockets were far too unsafe a technology on which to build a tourism industry:
The problem is safety. Simply put, rockets remain among the least safe means of transportation ever invented. Since 1980 the United States has launched some 440 orbital launch rockets (not including the Space Shuttle). Nearly five percent of those rockets have experienced total failure, either blowing up or wandering so far from course as to be useless. The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety — it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?
Ten years later there weren’t 100,000 space tourists but Richard Branson was predicting a more modest (!) 10,000 space tourists by 2022. Well, 2022 came and went and space tourism has yet to get off the ground. Overall, rockets still look very unsafe. Is anyone surprised? Blue Origin, for example has had 1 total failure in 22 flights, 4.5%. SpaceX has by far the best record with–generously not including test flights–1 total failure in 289 Falcon flights, .34%. That’s great and especially impressive given that Falcon flies much higher than other rockets! But wingsuit flying, no one’s ideas of a safe sport, is still safer than a SpaceX flight! (.2%) and commercial airlines are running at many orders of magnitude safer at .00034%.
Thus, after 20 years, I don’t see much reason to update. Like climbing Mount Everest or wingsuit flying, we might see a few flights a year catering to the rich and foolhardy but we have a long way to get before we get fat guys with cameras in space.
Japan fact of the day
People make a lot of the fact that Americans don’t travel a lot (43% have passports) but I’m not sure people realise how massive that is compared to Japan, where only 21.7m people now have passports, not even a fifth of the country.
Here is the link.
Low Income Drivers Gain from Congestion Pricing
….there is disagreement about the distributional effects of highway toll lanes. On one side, policymakers refer to dynamic tolling as “value pricing” and emphasize that it provides choice to drivers (Samdahl et al., 2013). On the other side, opponents are concerned that “Lexus lanes” enrich the wealthy at everyone else’s expense (Astor, 2017; Rosendorf, 2018). Evaluation of these perspectives depends on two empirical objects: the distribution of driver preferences and what we call the “road technology”—the relationship between traffic quantities and travel times. When one lane becomes tolled, drivers substitute from the newly priced lane into the remaining unpriced ones, increasing travel times in the unpriced lanes. High peak-hour prices may also induce drivers to substitute toward driving off-peak (or not at all), which can increase average speeds when the road technology is convex. Finally, since tolling changes the predictability of travel times, having the option to take the priced lanes can serve as insurance against worse-than-expected traffic conditions.
In this paper, we study the aggregate and distributional impacts of dynamic tolling. To do this, we bring together data on toll transactions, historical traffic conditions, and driver characteristics from the I-405 Express Toll Lanes in Washington State. We begin by presenting two sets of descriptive facts: first, aggregate speed and throughput increased after the introduction of tolling on this highway, and second, low-income drivers face advantageous trade-offs between price and travel time savings in the toll lanes. Next, to quantify the equilibrium effects of tolling, we build and estimate a model of driver demand, the road technology, and the pricing algorithm. In particular, the demand model incorporates the features of dynamic tolling highlighted above: choices of where and when to drive, as well as uncertainty about prices and travel times. Using the estimated model, we find that low-income drivers in fact gain the most from status-quo tolling, and we explore how equilibrium outcomes would change under counterfactual pricing policies.
Pearl Li from Stanford is on the job market.
Good Developments in Africa
The Guardian: Visas to visit Kenya are to be scrapped for other African nationals from next year as part of a movement towards opening up trade and travel within the continent.
“By the end of this year, no African will be required to have a visa to come to Kenya,” Kenya’s president, William Ruto, said at a climate change conference in Congo-Brazzaville.
Costly and time-consuming visa requirements, as well as high air fares, have long created barriers to inter-African travel for African passport holders; 32 out of 54 African countries still require the nationals of half or more countries on the continent to obtain a visa.
Good. Kenya should also scrap visas for US and European citizens!
This is part of Africa’s move to free trade with the The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest free trade area in the world measured by the number of countries participating. Eventually AfCTA will cover 1.3 billion people across 55 countries.
Visas can have very high costs in reducing travel and trade. Africa is moving in the right direction. The US and Europe in contrast are adding visa requirements and the wait times to get a US visa are an absurd embarrassment.
My Conversation with Harriet Karimi Muriithi
This is another CWT bonus episode, recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, outside of Nairobi. Harriet is a 22-year-old waitress. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Harriet is a 22-year-old hospitality professional living and working in Tatu City, a massive mixed-used development spearheaded by Jennings. Harriet grew up in the picturesque foothills of Mount Kenya before moving to the capital city as a child to pursue better schooling. She has witnessed Nairobi’s remarkable growth firsthand over the last decade. An ambitious go-getter, Harriet studied supply chain management but and wishes to open her own high-end restaurant.
In her conversation with Tyler, Harriet opens up about her TikTok hobby, love of fantasy novels, thoughts on improving Kenya’s education system, and how she leverages AI tools like ChatGPT in her daily life, the Chinese influence across Africa, the challenges women face in village life versus Nairobi, what foods to sample as a visitor to Kenya, her favorite musicians from Beyoncé to Nigerian Afrobeats stars, why she believes technology can help address racism, her Catholic faith and church attendance, how COVID-19 affected her education and Kenya’s recovery, the superstitions that persist in rural areas, the career paths available to Kenya’s youth today, why Nollywood movies captivate her, the diversity of languages and tribes across the country, whether Kenya’s neighbors impact prospects for peace, what she thinks of the decline in the size of families, why she enjoys podcasts about random acts of kindness, what infrastructure and lifestyle changes are reshaping Nairobi, if the British colonial legacy still influences politics today, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How ambitious are you?
MURIITHI: On a scale of 1 to 10, I will say an 8.5.
This episode is best consumed in combination with the episode with the village elder Githae Gitinji. The contrast between the two perspectives is startling. And here is my CWT episode with Stephen Jennings, concerning Tatu City itself.
My Conversation with Githae Gitinji
This is a special bonus episode of CWT, Githae is a 58-year-old village elder who mediates disputes and lives in Tatu City, Kenya, near Nairobi. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his conversation with Tyler, Githae discusses his work as a businessman in the transport industry and what he looks for when hiring drivers, the reasons he moved from his rural hometown to the city and his perspectives on urban vs rural living, Kikuyu cultural practices, his role as a community elder resolving disputes through both discussion and social pressure, the challenges Kenya faces, his call for more foreign investment to create local jobs, how generational attitudes differ, the role of religion and Githae’s Catholic faith, perspectives on Chinese involvement in Kenya and openness to foreigners, thoughts on the devolution of power to Kenyan counties, his favorite wildlife, why he’s optimistic about Kenya’s future despite current difficulties, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you do that the court system does not do? Because you’re not police, but still you do something useful.
GITHINJI: What we normally do, we as a group, we listen to one another very much. When one person reaches that stage of being told that you are a man now, you normally have to respect your elder. Those people do respect me. When I call you, when I tell you “Come and we’ll talk it out,” with my group, you cannot say you cannot come, because if you do, we normally discipline somebody. Not by beating, we just remove you from our group. When we isolate you from our group, you’ll feel that is not fair for you. You come back and say — and apologize. We take you back into the group.
COWEN: If you’re isolated, you can’t be friends with those people anymore.
GITHINJI: When we isolate you, we mean you are not allowed to interact in any way.
COWEN: Any way.
GITHINJI: Any business, anything with the other community [members]. If it is so, definitely, you have to be a loser, because you might be needing one of those people to help you in business or something of the sort. When you are isolated, this man tells you, “No. Go and cleanse yourself first with that group.”
If you find his Kikiyu accent difficult, just read the transcript instead. This episode is best consumed in a pair with my concurrently recorded episode with Harriet Karimi Muriithi, a 22-year-old Kenyan waitress — the contrasts in perspective across a mere generation are remarkable.
What should I ask Fuchsia Dunlop?
Yes I will be doing a third (!) Conversation with her. She has written some of the best books and cooked some of the best food. Here is her Wikipedia page. Here is her home page.
Here is her new book — self-recommending if anything was — Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.
Here is my previous podcast with Fuchsia, and here is my first podcast with her. This time around — what should I ask?
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Jennings
Recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, not far from Nairobi, Tatu City is a budding Special Enterprise Zone. Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode overview:
Stephen and Tyler first met over thirty years ago while working on economic reforms in New Zealand. With a distinguished career that transitioned from the New Zealand Treasury to significant ventures in emerging economies, Stephen now focuses on developing new urban landscapes across Africa as the founder and CEO of Rendeavour.
Tyler sat down with Stephen in Tatu City, one of his multi-use developments just north of Nairobi, where they discussed why he’s optimistic about Kenya in particular, why so many African cities appear to have low agglomeration externalities, how Tatu City regulates cars and designs for transportation, how his experience as reformer and privatizer informed the way utilities are provided, what will set the city apart aesthetically, why talent is the biggest constraint he faces, how Nairobi should fix its traffic problems, what variable best tracks Kenyan unity, what the country should do to boost agricultural productivity, the economic prospects for New Zealand, how playing rugby influenced his approach to the world, how living in Kenya has changed him, what he will learn next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Just give us some basic facts. Where is Tatu City right now, and where will it be headed when it’s more or less finished?
JENNINGS: Tatu City is the only operational special economic zone [SEZ] in the country. It is 5,000 hectares of fully planned urban development. It is at quite an advanced stage. We have 70 large-scale industrial companies with us, including major multinationals and many of the regional leaders. We have 3,000 students come on site every day to our four new schools. We’re advanced in building the first phase of the first new CBD for the region. We have tens of thousands of core center jobs moving into that area, together with other modern office amenities. All of the elements — we have many residential modules, thousands of new residential units at a wide range of price points — all of the elements of a new city are in place.
COWEN: How many people will end up living here?
JENNINGS: Around 250,000.
COWEN: And how many businesses?
JENNINGS: There’ll be thousands of businesses.
And delving more deeply into matters:
COWEN: What do you think is the book [on economic development] that has influenced you most?
JENNINGS: It’s a very good question. I think I’ve read just about everything in development. There’s nothing I really like very much. Development is a black box. I don’t think there’s anything that has much predictive power. There’s a lot of ex post explanations, whether they be policy settings, location, culture. I think 90% of them are ex post; very few of them are predictive. Some of them are just tautologies. I really like factualization.
It’s descriptive more than analytical, but it just makes it clear that most of the world has been on a very similar development trajectory. It’s just not sequenced. Sweden started early; Ethiopia started late. But the nature of the transition and the inevitability of that transition, other than very extreme circumstances, is kind of the same.
COWEN: What do you think economists get wrong?
JENNINGS: I don’t think we really understand development at all, because if we could, we could predict it. We can predict virtually nothing. It’s just too complicated. It’s too connected with politics. I think there’s a lot of feedback loops and elements of development that we don’t understand properly. We certainly can’t quantify them because the development’s happening in such a wide range of settings, from communism dictatorships through to very liberal systems and with all different kinds of industrial — on every dimension, there’s a huge range of variables.
Excellent and interesting throughout.
What should I ask Ami Vitale?
Yes I am doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Ami Vitale is an American photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, educator and speaker. In 2018, she published a photo book titled Panda Love which captures pandas within captivity and being released into the wild…
In 1994, Vitale joined the Associated Press (AP) as a picture editor in New York and Washington, D.C.[5][6] She self funded her travel through her work with AP and left for the Czech Republic in 1997.
She moved to Prague, Czech Republic, and spent a year covering the war in Kosovo, traveling back and forth to Prague, and spending a month at a time in the war zone. She later traveled to Angola, and then to the second Intifada in Gaza and Israel. In 2000, she received an Alexia Foundation grant to document a small village in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau.
Vitale currently photographs wildlife and environmental stories in order to educate about global conservation issues. She is a visual journalist working as a photographer for National Geographic, a documentary filmmaker, and a cinematographer. Her recent still photography focuses on wildlife conservation in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As an ambassador for Nikon and a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine, she has documented wildlife and poaching in Africa, covered human-wildlife conflict, and concentrated on efforts to save the northern white rhino and reintroduce pandas to the wild.
She has traveled to more than one hundred countries. Here is her home page, which includes links to her documentaries. Here is her Instagram.
So what should I ask her?
My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?
MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.
I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.
I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.
COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.
MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.
There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.
Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”
Recommended, interesting throughout. Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
What should I ask Patrick McKenzie?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. Patrick is a phenomenon of the modern age. He writes the excellent Bits About Money, which focuses on money, banking, payments, and more.
His blog is Kalzumeus. He has lived most of his adult life in Japan, and has many excellent posts about Japan. Here are his greatest hits on the blog. He has run national shadow vaccine location information infrastructure. On Twitter he is @patio11.
So what should I ask him?