Recent Reads January 2024

 

The Mysteries – Watterson and Kascht

 

Everyone was excited that Watterson had a new project coming out.

 

But the buzz died down once it was released.

 

You can get this book and read through it in a few minutes.

 

It’s about the unknown and how we capture the unknown and it loses its power once we describe it and how the universe moves on without us.

 

It’s not that’s its bad but that people of my generation have such warm memories of what Watterson created before that anything was going to be something of a letdown. And that’s what this is, a bit of a letdown. At least the art is cool.

 

How the South Won Civil War – Heather Cox Richardson

 

I went through a couple of weeks there just reading books with depressing subject matter, and this was one of the more depressing.

 

Richardson covers just a litany about how racism was built into the country at its founding, and how it continues. What was interesting to me was how she traced the move of southern racism to go with the expanding west – an ideal of a lone cowboy on the frontier that replaced the tidewater cavaliers.

 

The only drawback is there are places where the narrative lags and feels a bit repetitive, which is balanced out by the shortness of the text.

 

A Creature Wanting Form – Luke O’Neil

O’Neil is one of my favorite writers working today, publishing in his “Welcome to Hellworld” newsletter where he shows his readers things to be both sad and mad about. This is a related text to that project, but it is his fictions (fictions that are very close to the real world but that allow him to shape the narrative some). They’re short and punch you in the gut and the best description is that these stories are like what emo would be if emo were a literary form and not a musical genre.  

 

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict – Crossley & James

I enjoyed reading this materialist approach to the life of Jesus. It was a good exploration of both what his life would have been like and the world he lived in, as well as the construction of the gospels and the epistles. The author did a really good job putting the construction of the books of the bible in context in looking at similarities and differences in the stories between Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and examining how that represented what might have been going on in the larger “Jesus Movement” that sprang forth 2000 years ago. Even as an atheist, this book made me want to go back to the original text to look at it with fresh eyes.

 

A Fear of Too Much Justice – Bright & Kwak

 

Our authors here show the myriad ways that the justice system does not serve justice, from how differently different jurisdictions apply the death penalty and how hard it is to appeal those cases, to the problem of all-white juries to how disproportionate justice is meted out to the poor than it is to the rich (the right to an attorney being more on paper than in practice). It seems that the justice system in America exists more as a form of social control than a way to actually attain justice for any victims, real or perceived. It’s not that I didn’t know this going in, but books like this are good in that they lay out the case in a well-organized manner that gets you all red and mad with the system and those that perpetuate it. The problem, of course, is that it is way easier to look at the problems than to make a single fix. You can spend your whole career trying to reform just one little piece of the larger issues and though you would be doing a lot of good to the world, the system would still be 99.99% as bad as it was when you found it broken and wanted to go about fixing it.

 

 

 

math exposition poster

 

Walmart: Benefits of the Blockchain in the Supply Chain

I must admit to being something of a skeptic on the blockchain. The first I really became aware of the technology was a decade ago, when the first hype cycle for bitcoin was raging. For me, writing in “A skeptical look at Bitcoin” (Mihelic 2013), I argued that bitcoin itself did not fulfill any of the three basic definitions of money. Instead, it acts like a commodity or an equity, but the difference is that there is not cash flow except for the new people coming into the space, and that is problematic if you want people making transactions and treating the technology as a currency. Bitcoin and related protocols have not sold me, despite their incredible appreciation in dollar value. I have learned more in that there are also limits to how fast you can make transactions and the cost of these transactions with the proof of work protocol. Some of these issues have been worked on with different protocols that make the transaction less computation heavy.

The ideal blockchain is one where you have a need for two parties that function as equals in an exchange but there might be limited trust, and this is a transaction where you want the details to be immutable. The very nature of the ledger is that the history is there embedded in the chain. This transparency is good in that there is no need for middle-people and the market can clear and exchanges or contracts are executed, and the people move on. This exchange is recorded, but there is a potential for distance in not knowing who the actors are. There is a balance between transparency and anonymity. Using a cryptocurrency based on the blockchain is thus the primary possible use case, especially for something like remittances. Unfortunately for the boosters, it feels as if cryptocurrencies are actually exchanged for goods or services the anonymity is the prime benefit, using the technology for ransomware or drugs and not for something like remittances. Ultimately the blockchain feels like a cool and interesting technology chasing a use case. In a lot of ways you could use an ordinary currency or an SQL-based Access database for a lot of the things people trumpet as uses for the blockchain.

However, blockchains do have their uses, even if only in niche cases. For example, the video “Blockchains: how can they be used?” covers using blockchain technology to prevent odometer fraud (2018, 1:10). It is the perfect example because you have two or more parties at the same basic level of power, and you want that transparency so that everyone can track the mileage of a car – from the insurance companies and mechanics to a future purchaser of the used car. It’s a niche case and as the second example of a way that blockchain be used, it is not very overwhelming. The problem with this is that it still needs centralization and coordination to work. To really make blockchain work, you need people to want to coordinate their efforts or you need some sort of centralized director. The niche cases of blockchain thus will work best if siloed in one company or industry that has these existing incentives.

One company that has the power and incentives to work on these niche cases is Walmart. Aside from everything else they do, and their giant footprint in the digital retail space, they have over a quarter of the market share in the US grocery market (“CEOS,” 2022). This means that they are basically responsible for coordinating the feeding of 80 million Americans every year.  That Walmart manages has managed to do so as they have grown is a marvel of efficiency, but there are always more places to be more efficient. Using the blockchain in their supply chain management will have multiple advantages, in an initiative called by McKeen and Smith as a “Business Improvement,” where the goal is to “reengineering initiatives to help organizations streamline their processes and save substantial amounts of money by eliminating unnecessary or duplicate activities” (2019 p. 23).

Currently many retailers use the UPC codes, which identify which specific group that an item belongs to, but the UPC just shows that item as part of a set. With blockchain technology, every single individual item will be able to be tagged with a unique identifier. Either it can be scanned at different points, or it can take advantage of technology like RIFD chips which will allow the item to be tracked in real time and not rely on scanners. This technology may be cost prohibitive at scale for less expensive items, but it does have the benefit of not needing the human labor in the loop every time an item needs to be scanned and inventoried. A company with the scale of Walmart will have the ability to find the break-even point and implement the technology, and additionally this connects to the internet of things which as it scales will help drive company costs down.

Once the tagging and blockchain are implemented, Walmart should be able to see several business improvement benefits. Most of these will be clear to the bottom line, while others will be less tangible. First, the entire supply chain will be visible to the blockchain system in real time. The company will be able to see where things are moving well and places where things are sitting around causing bottlenecks. This will help them be able to be smarter in their purchasing and to be able to reduce prices to move out stale inventory and hopefully reduce the cost of storage as having real time tracking means that just in time purchasing is more feasible. If there is one thing worse than having too much inventory, it is not having the inventory your customers want to buy.

A blockchain based system is also more secure. The ledger is permanent, so any potential malfeasance in terms of faking the inventory count is lowered. The real time tracking also means that you know where your items are until the moment that the leave your store. If you are Walmart, you want that item to have left the store through the act of purchasing, and not by leaving surreptitiously through the front or back door. The blockchain supply chain will lower shrinkage from your customers and your employees.

Finally, the blockchain based inventory system will make your customers safer. The news often has frightening information about some sort of vegetable that has some sort of contamination that makes it unsafe for consumption. This is scary because often these recalls are extremely broad, making you throw out your spinach that might be perfectly fine, but that you dispose of it out of caution. A more robust inventory and supply chain solution will allow Walmart to be able to identify that supplier and to remove their products from the stores immediately. There would be a greater benefit if Walmart could use their power to push tagging and identification out to their suppliers so they could track any potential issues to a single box of grapes, but that is an initiative that might be for down the road as it exists on the edge of the company’s silo. The swift and targeted removal of tainted produce will not just save money, but will help generate goodwill from the customer base, as they learn that Walmart can be trusted to have fresh and safe produce.

There may be other benefits from the implementation of a blockchain for supply chain and inventory tracking at Walmart, but of the potential business improvements that we looked at, all should have a positive effect on the bottom line of the business, and help grow the business as customers know that Walmart will continue to have what they need, when they need it, and at competitive prices because of the efficiencies that they gain from their investments in technology.

 

References

Bitter, A. (2022, December 1). CEOS from Kroger and Albertsons say they're worried about competition from Amazon, but the e-commerce giant barely makes up 1% of US grocery sales. Business Insider. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-kroger-still-top-grocer-challengers-amazon-gopuff-2022-2

McKeen, J. D., & Smith, H. (2019). It strategy et innovation. Prospect Press.

Mihelic, J. E. (2013, November 28). A skeptical look at Bitcoin. Econ Autodidactic. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://econautodidactic.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-skeptical-look-at-bitcoin.html

Simply Explained. (2018, May 29). Blockchains: How can they be used? (use cases for blockchains). YouTube. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQWflNQuP_o

Recent Reads in September

 

Schulz – The Street of Crocodiles

 

The thing about Schulz is that he is great at making atmosphere. It reminds me of something from Kafka or Thomas Mann. I’m not sure if it is just a thing from time and place or something else.

 

The problem is that the thing with plot or character goes lacking where the whole thing seems to be the weather hanging over this mid-war black sea community. So, in all the stories it felt like something was wanting.

 

Rodney – Decolonial Marxism

 

I recently made it through the text that made Rodney’s name, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” and the bulk of these essays feel like the seed of that larger work. I sure have learned more about the African side of decolonialism through reading Rodney, but some of these essays are hit or miss – reading the text as a book started slow and didn’t pick up until the middle. This might be a question of the editing choices though.

 

Burmila – Chaotic Neutral

 

Burmila’s book is hard to read. It’s well written but it’s hard to read because as someone who doesn’t really identify with the Democrats, but hopes that they win over the other guys, a lot of the book is just a list of all the dumb things that the party has done over the years to marginalize themselves and not fight back against Republican selfishness.

 

For better or worse, he also eschews simple, pat answers at the end. It made me think of Selfa’s “ The Democrats: A Critical History” but snarkier. And you can feel that Burmila is a bit invested in the success of leftish electoralism and hasn’t fully given up.

 

Moore – Batman: The Killing Joke

 

I enjoyed this book – the art in the text is beautiful and well printed and looks clean and crisp printed in the hardcover. It’s worth holding on to. The story is interesting as well, with the Joker having some back-story and the end of the book closing on a hilarious joke. A worthwhile read for the evening.

 

 

Moore – Swamp Thing: Book Six

 

So, it feels that by the end of the arc, Moore started running out of ideas about what to do with the character. Thus, you end up with these books where Swamp Thing is making his way back home through space. The stories are more science fiction, more experimental, and less grounded than some of the other books in the series. I’m not 100% sure it works, but the entire arc ends up tying together well.

 

Recent Reads, August

 

Second Treatise of Government – John Locke

 

I’ve read a couple of things recently from enlightenment-era political philosophers that start from some supposed state of nature  but their idea of a state of nature is wrong from what we know of anthropology. I’m not sure if this entirely invalidates Locke here or Rousseau elsewhere.

A couple of things here that strike me. What Locke in this work was doing was basically writing in support of the status quo. But I find it weird that a hundred years later the framers in the colonies went and took his defense of a constitutional monarchy and then adjusted it a bit for a somewhat representative democracy.

There’s a lot of assumptions built in here that go unquestioned from what a “just” war is to slavery to patrilineal inheritance that probably should be unpacked a bit but are not.

 

Swamp Thing Book One – Moore

I was looking for a fun book to read to clear my mind and this fit the bill pretty well. Moore is an interesting writer, and the stories are compelling, even if the character constrains some of what can be done. It’s organic and very green in the environmental sense. I’ve already ordered the next couple of collections of the series.

The art, coloring, and page composition also work well with the story. I think of the early 80s as a period of reinvention in the genre with Moore and Miller and having read a few Miller texts recently and been underwhelmed, the Swamp Thing book feels like an amazingly coherent text in a way that The Dark Knight Returns wasn’t for me.

 

The Hurting Kind – Limon

Limon’s poems have these spare lines and the focus on nature that make me feel like I’m standing at the shore of a lake as the sun sets in the west behind me. They’re good poems and I can understand why they were award-nominated but they just weren’t for me in the moment I was reading them.

 

Floaters – Espada

 

I don’t know exactly why I liked these poems, but this collection is my jam. I like the structure, the longer, looping lines that are almost prosaic but not. I like the subject matter, this immigrant, class conscious text as the poems and their subjects navigates a world that is against them. I will definitely seek out more work by Martin Espada

 

Black Aperture – Rasmussen

This collection of poems centers around the subject of the suicide of the brother of the poetic first person – I am assuming it is the poet’s personal voice but well done if in a persona. The poems work on their own level individually but build up as if a composer were layering instrument over instrument to make a coherent whole. The poems feel youthful, but not like juvenilia but fresh like the spring after a frigid winter.

 

Hard to Be a God – Strugatsky Brothers

 

I found this book to be a real page turner. The conceit is that the protagonist is a visitor historian in this medieval like setting who can observe and participate but not really have any drastic life changing effect on the people in the world he is visiting. I like it because it really melds the idea of science fiction and fantasy in a way that is outside of the genre constraints I am used to as a western reader. The situation the authors create is interesting, the plot within that world is compelling, and the characters are fairly well fleshed out. This is a trifecta that is often not met in science fiction writing and I appreciate it.

 

Middlemarch – Eliot

Reading this felt like homework. I bought it a while back because someone said that it was one of the funniest books in the language and as someone with multiple degrees in English it felt wrong to not have read the text.

So, I started reading it in early March to be able to make a joke about the middle of march when I finish it, but it took me months and months to read. It did pick up, but the first several hundred pages or so are these character sketches where I was saying to myself “Oh, the title is after the town because the town is the main character.” We do start to focus on some people.

The thing is I do not care about these people or their problems (except maybe the ambitious doctor who is working to revolutionize science but is not readily accepted by the town with his new-fangled ways). Its all about who is married or going to marry whom and where is this inheritance going. It is incredibly well written and structured, but I just don’t care about these people.

A couple of other things. Sure, it is about the town but there’s no servants or tradespeople except for in passing, an invisibility that is noticeable by the absence. There’s one place where a couple is bankrupt, and they are lamenting that they will be only able to keep one servant. The horror! The other thing is that when it was written, it was a period piece written about the time of the passing of the first reform bill which was by then decades in the past. I’m guessing a lot of the humor is based on that but from this vantage point you need the footnotes and footnotes aren’t funny.

 

Discourse on Inequality – Rousseau

 

I have the Penguin edition of this text, which wraps the short two books of the discourse in a lengthy introduction and then copious notes. Rousseau’s text isn’t actually exceptionally long, but in spite of its brevity there are some interesting quotable parts, none more so than the first part of book two where he claims that the first person to make a fence was the creator of civilization. I’ve long liked that quote and it was the whole reason I read the text, wanting to see that in context.

It was mostly worth it, mainly since the book is so short. What really got me though was that the first book was mainly about the development of language. It kind of makes sense to examine that since in a way you could argue that the fact of language is one of the defining characteristics of humans. However, it was hard to read since (like other enlightenment era philosophers such as Locke’s “Second Treatise”) Rousseau posits a state of nature where people are not social but are isolated individuals. So, his basis of civilization and language development are wrong based on what we know now. I guess that’s ok in a way since each generation builds off the last, but it is jarring from my current position.

In concert with that issue of the state of nature is that the introduction here talks about Rousseau’s writing process in that he went to a cabin and walked in the woods to develop his ideas. It’s like Descartes sitting on a pot and recreating the world through his own reason – a wanting of empiricism in a world that was learning more about itself. What is really striking though is that I wanted more sources and there are truly little in the text but there’s a proof of some research that’s in the notes. It’s like this text is just the seed of a larger project that was taken off into a different direction.

 

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – Hume

I didn’t really connect to Hume here. Things just felt muddled, and I don’t know if it is Hume’s thought, how it was presented here, or something else.  Dude was huge into looking at causation but more than anything this book made me think of the bigger picture. Going back to Hume made me wonder what philosophy would have looked like in enlightenment Europe had the church not have had such a huge influence. You had to work from a Christian cosmology as a starting point and that was even the lens that the ancients were seen though. I can’t help but think that it was a hinderance. Or not – Kantian deontology needs some sort of basis for its ethics that are outside of the human realm so a posited perfect god might not be horrible. Perhaps it just slowed the development of utilitarianism.

 

Road to Nowhere – Paris Marx

Here Marx outlines the history and present of transportation and deconstructs how the current capitalistic visionaries are just basically throwing software at a broken system. While I was reading it, I kept mentally going back to that Henry Ford quote where if he asked the people what they wanted, he would have just given them a faster horse. What Elon Musk is doing is basically just doing that – giving the world a faster horse and not really creating the future of transportation that we need, a future that looks to the past but deals with current problems of mobility, climate, and livability.

 

Internet for the People – Tarnoff

I read this book in the weekend after the decision striking down Roe passed and let me tell you that this not the mindset that an author hopes that their readers have. Tarnoff shows how the development of the internet was in public hands and how it was given away to private interests and how we might take it back and why we should want that. I agree with all of that but reading it I felt like it was part of a larger and necessary project that involves the democratization of more of the economic sphere. It is important but when I was reading it, I felt that this part wasn’t urgent. I think the book was good, but I would advise you not to read it while you have utter despair for the state of the nation hanging over you.

 

People’s Republic of Walmart – Phillips and Rozworski

 

I really like the Verso and Jacobin crossover texts. They’re well designed and easy to read. Here the authors make the argument that basically central planning is already happening, it is just happening at the firm level. I like the argument and it is interesting, I just worry about the efficiency of the planning, as we know that the firms here like Wal-Mart and Amazon have a lot of waste embedded in them. If we wanted to scale that up to a higher level, we would want to minimize that waste. I’m still somewhat skeptical of any central planning based on Hayek’s knowledge argument from the uses of knowledge in society that was his ultimate answer to the socialist calculation debate, but this is an issue that has been explored since then and I think we’ve gotten closer to potential full efficiency. This book is a good introduction to these issues, and it is a worthwhile read. My only real complaint is that there no bibliography at the end – I really wanted to go to their sources and that’s not collected at the end.

 

The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov

 

I wrote my master’s thesis on this trilogy. I’ve read it cover to cover over a dozen times, and parts of it more than that. I have come to a conclusion about Asimov generally and this text specifically, and that is that Asimov was not that great of a writer when it came to plot or characters but awesome when it came to ideas. What do we know about his texts? Psychohistory and the three laws of robotics! But the characters and the things they do? Not much.

I didn’t go down this path to find out just what has been researched about the writing of the books, but I feel like Asimov came across the idea of Psychohistory (Basically history plus math and economics to tell (and control) the future). And he’s writing the first stories and the who arc is that there’s a crisis and then the characters go to the Time Vault and see Seldon, and the problem is solved though his Deus ex machina. That gets boring so he needed something outside of his own creation which is why he created the Mule and then had to bring in the Second Foundation. It’s like the old lady who swallowed the fly thing – and worse when you think of how he integrated everything in the late books he wrote in the 80s. Everything works if you don’t think too hard about it, but I literally spent years thinking about the thing and it falls apart on examination. Is it worth reading? Yes, a thousand times yes. But is it good? Not really.

Blackshirts and Reds – Parenti

I bought this because I had not read anything by Michael Parenti before and this was one of his shorter texts. The thing that struck me most about it was that I had thought that it was more recent, not 30 years old . The problem with that is that it still feels of the time and important – fascism is always present and needs awareness and pushback. We just have to keep fighting, in all eras.

 

Archaeologies of the Future – Jameson

 

This book is interesting in that it is structure as theory for the first half (postmodern utopias, dystopias, and anti-utopias) and then a set of essays in the second half where Jameson is applying the ideas he’s talking about as he examines various science fiction texts. I read this because I was working on the idea of utopia in science fiction but eventually didn’t use it since my project went a different direction. It was worthwhile and I read through it a couple of times since it was good background in helping me develop a vocabulary for critically thinking about and writing about science fiction  -- even if I didn’t understand half of what he was writing about.

 

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

 

I read this right as I was starting out on a project writing about science fiction for a school project. It was a lot of surface level on both the canon and the criticism, but it was a great jumping off point for my research as I took this and extended my research on specific texts and critics. If you’re looking for an introduction on science fiction criticism, this is a good starting point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Politics of Love

 I know that not everyone shares my personal politics, which are to the left of the general public. There may be places that they stand in contradiction to each other, and some things are hard to reconcile but I imagine most people’s personal politics aren’t 100% ideologically coherent – we all live contingent and reactive lives and often only deal with what’s in front of us at the moment.

 

That said, my own personal politics come from a deeply empathetic place, one that knows some suffering and knows how big the world is and how each and every one of us has our own interesting story and hopes and dreams and fears and love.

 

Love – that’s where I come from. I love humans in all their varied and messy ways since we are all imperfect creatures continually trying to make sense of this big and confusing world. There are a few things that I don’t love though, and that includes cruelty and selfishness. These go against my fundamental empathy because it creates out-groups who it is ok to treat differently. I understand the impulse as we live on the edge of scarcity or deep within it. Though I understand the impulse, I cannot accept it. As the poet said, we must love one another, or die.

The Unhidden Curriculum: Bellemare's "Doing Economics"

Back when I was a baby in undergrad, I saw my professors and wanted to have their job. How nice, I thought, it must be to only teach a few classes a semester and have all that free time.
 
I sought out graduate school and even then, my main waring was that I should not got into debt for graduate school. It was not until I was in graduate school when I had a class that an introduction to graduate studies (this being an earlier version of myself who wanted to be a poet or something like that). Only then was there a glimpse of what it meant to work in and around academia as a profession and not just as a scholarly pursuit.
 
There’s a hidden curriculum that doesn’t stay hidden on purpose, I don’t think, but is more passed on down though folk wisdom. I imagine this is why PhDs are way more likely to have parents with terminal degrees than any random person on the street. There’s a lot below the surface that even if you are studying a subject that you just don’t know. There’s rules to these games and a lot of people walk though the door without even knowing that they’re playing a game.
 
In “Doing Economics,” Marc Bellemare tries to lay these rules out for people. He breaks down what you should have in your applied econ papers, and he breaks down what your approach should be to different kinds of presentations and even about how you should approach social media. One noticeable absence is how to navigate the job market, but I guess even with then more standardized search method econ has the market is heterogeneous enough and changes enough it would be a dated topic the day the book was published. The author does make acknowledgements of this absence.
 
My only real quibble is that I think the subtitle has the audience wrong. It might be worthwhile for junior scholars, but I think the real utility would be more for your motivated juniors who are thinking about going to graduate school. That introduction to grad studies was great in that it really showed me what the profession would be like. I might have better served professionally had I not moved across the country as a young man trying to pursue my dreams when I didn’t really even know what my dreams were. It all worked out in the end though, so I have no complaints.