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Here some people have expressed interest in my take on AI broadly, and then there's Deepseek-Coder release, but I've been very busy and the field is moving so very fast again, it felt like a thankless job to do what Zvi does and without his doomer agenda too (seeing the frenetic feed on Twitter, one can be forgiven for just losing the will; and, well, I suppose Twitter explains a lot about our condition in general). At times I envy Iconochasm who tapped out. Also, this is a very niche technical discussion and folks here prefer policy.
But, in short: open source AI, in its most significant aspects, which I deem to be code generation and general verifiable reasoning (you can bootstrap most everything else from it), is now propped up by a single Chinese hedge fund (created in the spirit of Renaissance Capital) which supports a small, ignored (except by scientists and a few crackpots on Twitter) research division staffed with some nonames, who are quietly churning out extraordinarily good models with the explicit aim of creating AGI in the open. These models happen to be (relatively) innocent of benchmark-gaming, but somewhat aligned to Chinese values. The modus operandi of DeepSeek is starkly different from that of either other Chinese or Western competitors. In effect this is the only known group both meaningfully pursuing frontier capabilities and actively teaching others how to do so. I think this is interesting and a modest cause for optimism. I am also somewhat reluctant to write about this publicly because there exist lovers of Freedom here, and it would be quite a shame if my writing contributed to targeted sanctions and even more disempowerment of the small man by the state machinery in the final accounting.
But the cat's probably out of the bag. The first progress prize of AI Mathematical Olympiad had just been taken by a team using their DeepSeekMath-7B model, solving 29 out of 50 private test questions «less challenging than those in the IMO but at the level of IMO preselection»; Terence Tao finds it «somewhat higher than expected» (he is on the AIMO Advisory Committee, along with his fellow Fields medalist Timothy Gowers).
The next three teams entered with this model as well.
I. The shape of the game board
To provide some context, here's an opinionated recap of AI trends since last year. I will be focusing exclusively on LLMs, as that's what matters (image gen, music gen, TTS etc largely are trivial conveniences, and other serious paradigms seem to be in their embryonic stage or in deep stealth).
- We have barely advanced in true out-of-distribution reasoning/understanding relative to the original «Sparks of AGI» GPT-4 (TheDag, me); GPT-4-04-29 and Sonnet 3.5 were the only substantial – both minor – steps forward, Gemini was a catch-up effort, and nobody else has yet credibly reached the same tier. We have also made scant progress towards consensus on whether that-which-LLMs-do is «truly» reasoning or understanding; sensible people have recoursed to something like «it's its own kind of mind, and hella useful».
- Meanwhile there's been a great deal of progress in scaffolding (no more babyAGI/AutoGPT gimmicry, now agents are climbing up the genuinely hard SWE-bench), code and math skills, inherent robustness in multi-turn interactions and responsiveness to nuanced feedback (to the point that LLMs can iteratively improve sizable codebases – as pair programmers, not just fancy-autocomplete «copilots»), factuality, respect of prioritized system instructions, patching badly covered parts of the world-knowledge/common sense manifold, unironic «alignment» and ironing out Sydney-like kinks in deployment, integrating non-textual modalities, managing long contexts (merely usable 32K "memory" was almost sci-fi back then, now 1M+ with strong recall is table stakes at the frontier; with 128K mastered on a deeper level by many groups) and a fairly insane jump in cost-effectiveness – marginally driven by better hardware, and mostly by distilling from raw pretrained models, better dataset curation, low-level inference optimizations, eliminating architectural redundancies and discovering many "good enough" if weaker techniques (for example, DPO instead of PPO). 15 months ago,"$0.002/1000 tokens" for gpt-3.5-turbo seemed incredible; now we always count tokens by the million, and Gemini-Flash blows 3.5-turbo out of the water for half that, so hard it's not funny; and we have reason to believe it's still raking in >50% margins whereas OpenAI probably subsidized their first offerings (though in light of distilling and possibly other methods of compute reuse, it's hard to rigorously account for a model's capital costs now).
- AI doom discourse has continued to develop roughly as I've predicted, but with MIRI pivoting to evidence-free advocacy, orthodox doomerism getting routed as a scientific paradigm, more extreme holdovers from it («emergent mesaoptimizers! tendrils of agency in inscrutable matrices!») being wearily dropped by players who matter, and misuse (SB 1047 etc) + geopolitical angle (you've probably seen young Leopold) gaining prominence.
- The gap in scientific and engineering understanding of AI between the broader community and "the frontier" has shrunk since the debut of GPT-4 or 3.5, because there's too much money to be made in AI and only so much lead you can get out of having assembled the most driven AGI company. Back then, only a small pool of external researchers could claim to understand what the hell they did above the level of shrugging "well, scale is all you need" (wrong answer) or speculating about some simple methods like "train on copyrighted textbooks" (spiritually true); people chased rumors, leaks… Now it takes weeks at most to trace a yet another jaw-dropping magical demo to papers, to cook up a proof of concept, or even to deem the direction suboptimal; the other two leading labs no longer seem desperate, and we're in the second episode of Anthropic's comfortable lead.
- Actual, downloadable open AI sucks way less than I've lamented last July. But it still sucks. And that's really bad, since it sucks most in the dimension that matters: delivering value, in the basest sense of helping do work that gets paid. And the one company built on the promise of «decentralizing intelligence», which I had hope for, had proven unstable.
To be more specific, open source (or as some say now, given the secretiveness of full recipes and opacity of datasets, «open weights») AI has mostly caught up in «creativity» and «personality», «knowledge» and some measure of «common sense», and can be used for petty consumer pleasures or simple labor automation, but it's far behind corporate products in «STEM» type skills, that are in short supply among human employees too: «hard» causal reasoning, information integration, coding, math. (Ironically, I agree here with whining artists that we're solving domains of competence in the wrong order. Also it's funny how by default coding seems to be what LLMs are most suited for, as the sequence of code is more constrained by preceding context than natural language is).
To wit, Western and Eastern corporations alike generously feed us – while smothering startups – fancy baubles to tinker with, charismatic talking toys; as they rev up self-improvement engines for full cycle R&D, the way imagined by science fiction authors all these decades ago, monopolizing this bright new world. Toys are getting prohibitively expensive to replicate, with reported pretraining costs up to ≈$12 million and counting now. Mistral's Mixtral/Codestral, Musk's Grok-0, 01.Ai's Yi-1.5, Databricks' DBRX-132B, Alibaba's Qwens, Meta's fantastic Llama 3 (barring the not-yet-released 405B version), Google's even better Gemma 2, Nvidia's massive Nemotron-340B – they're all neat. But they don't even pass for prototypes of engines you can hop on and hope to ride up the exponential curve. They're too… soft. And not economical for their merits.
Going through our archive, I find this year-old analysis strikingly relevant:
I think successful development of a trusted open model rivaling chatgpt in capability is likely in the span of a year, if people like you, who care about long-term consequences of lacking access to it, play their cards reasonably well. […] Companies whose existence depends on the defensibility of the moat around their LM-derived product will tend to structure the discourse around their product and technology to avoid even the fleeting perception of being a feasibly reproducible commodity.
That's about how it went. While the original ChatGPT, that fascinating demo, is commodified now, competitive product-grade AI systems are not, and companies big and small still work hard to maintain the impression that it takes
- some secret sauce (OpenAI, Anthropic)
- work of hundreds of Ph.Ds (Deepmind)
- vast capital and compute (Meta)
- "frontier experience" (Reka)
– and even then, none of them have felt secure enough yet to release a serious threat to the other's proprietary offers.
I don't think it's a big exaggerion to say that the only genuine pattern breaker – presciently mentioned by me here – is DeepSeek, the company that has single-handedly changed – a bit – my maximally skeptical spring'2023 position on the fate of China in the AGI race.
II. Deep seek what?
AGI, I guess. Their Twitter bio states only: «Unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity. Answer the essential question with long-termism». It is claimed by the Financial Times that they have a recruitment pitch «We believe AGI is the violent beauty of model x data x computing power. Embark on a ‘deep quest’ with us on the journey towards AGI!» but other than that nobody I know of has seen any advertisement or self-promotion from them (except for like 70 tweets in total, all announcing some new capability or responding to basic user questions about license), so it's implausible that they're looking for attention or subsidies. Their researchers maintain near-perfect silence online. Their – now stronger and cheaper – models tend to be ignored in comparisons by Chinese AI businesses and users. As mentioned before, one well-informed Western ML researcher has joked that they're the bellwether for «the number of foreign spies embedded in the top labs».
FT also says the following of their parent company:
Its funds have returned 151 per cent, or 13 per cent annualised, since 2017, and were achieved in China’s battered domestic stock market. The country’s benchmark CSI 300 index, which tracks China’s top 300 stocks, has risen 8 per cent over the same time period, according to research provider Simu Paipai.
In February, Beijing cracked down on quant funds, blaming a stock market sell-off at the start of the year on their high-speed algorithmic trading. Since then, High-Flyer’s funds have trailed the CSI 300 by four percentage points.
[…] By 2021, all of High-Flyer’s strategies were using AI, according to manager Cai Liyu, employing strategies similar to those pioneered by hugely profitable hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. “AI helps to extract valuable data from massive data sets which can be useful for predicting stock prices and making investment decisions,” …
Cai said the company’s first computing cluster had cost nearly Rmb200mn and that High Flyer was investing about Rmb1bn to build a second supercomputing cluster, which would stretch across a roughly football pitch-sized area. Most of their profits went back into their AI infrastructure, he added. […] The group acquired the Nvidia A100 chips before Washington restricted their delivery to China in mid-2022.
“We always wanted to carry out larger-scale experiments, so we’ve always aimed to deploy as much computational power as possible,” founder Liang told Chinese tech site 36Kr last year. “We wanted to find a paradigm that can fully describe the entire financial market.”
In a less eclectic Socialist nation this would've been sold as Project Cybersyn or OGAS. Anyway, my guess is they're not getting subsidies from the Party any time soon.
They've made a minor splash in the ML community eight months ago, in late October, releasing an unreasonably strong Deepseek-Coder. Yes, in practice an awkward replacement for GPT-3.5, yes, contaminated with test set, which prompted most observers to discard it as a yet another Chinese fraud. But it proved to strictly dominate hyped-up things like Meta's CodeLLaMA and Mistral's Mixtral 8x7b in real-world performance, and time and again proved to be the strongest open baseline in research papers. On privately designed, new benchmarks like this fresh one from Cohere it's clear that they did get to parity with OpenAI's workhorse model, right on the first public attempt – as far as coding is concerned.
On top of that, they shared a great deal of information about how: constructing the dataset from Github, pretraining, finetuning. The paper was an absolute joy to read, sharing even details on unsuccessful experiments. It didn't offer much in the way of novelty; I evaluate it as a masterful, no-unforced-errors integration of fresh (by that point) known best practices. Think about your own field and you'll probably agree that even this is a high bar. And in AI, it is generally the case that either you get a great model with «we trained it on some text… probably» tech report (Mistral, Google), or a mediocre one accompanied by a fake-ass novel full of jargon (every second Chinese group). Still, few cared.
Coder was trained, it seems, using lessons of the less impressive Deepseek-LLM-67B (even so, it was roughly Meta's LLaMA-2-70B peer that also could code; a remarkable result for a literally-who new team), which somehow came out a month after. Its paper (released even later still) was subtitled «Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism». I am not sure if this was some kind of joke at the expense of effective altruists. What they meant concretely was the following:
Over the past few years, LLMs … have increasingly become the cornerstone and pathway to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). … Guided by the scaling laws, we introduce DeepSeek LLM, a project dedicated to advancing open-source LMs with a long-term perspective.
- …Soon, we will release our technique reports in code intelligence and Mixture-of-Experts(MoE), respectively. They show how we create high-quality code data for pre-training, and design a sparse model to achieve dense model performance.
- At present, we are constructing a larger and improved dataset for the upcoming version of DeepSeek LLM. We hope the reasoning, Chinese knowledge, math, and code capabilities will be significantly improved in the next version.
- Our alignment team is dedicated to studying ways to deliver a model that is helpful, honest, and safe to the public. Our initial experiments prove that reinforcement learning could boost model complex reasoning capability.
…I apologize for geeking out. All that might seem normal enough. But, a) they've fulfilled every one of those objectives since then. And b) I've read a great deal of research papers and tech reports, entire series from many groups, and I don't remember this feeling of cheerful formidability. It's more like contemplating the dynamism of SpaceX or Tesla than wading through a boastful yet obscurantist press release. It is especially abnormal for a Mainland Chinese paper to be written like this – with friendly confidence, admitting weaknesses, pointing out errors you might repeat, not hiding disappointments behind academese word salad; and so assured of having a shot in an honest fight with the champion.
In the Coder paper, they conclude:
…This advancement underscores our belief that the most effective code-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) are those built upon robust general LLMs. The reason is evident: to effectively interpret and execute coding tasks, these models must also possess a deep understanding of human instructions, which often come in various forms of natural language. Looking ahead, our commitment is to develop and openly share even more powerful code-focused LLMs based on larger-scale general LLMs.
In the Mixture-of-Experts paper (8th January), they've shown themselves capable of novel architectural research too, introducing a pretty ingenuous «fine-grained MoE with shared experts» design with the objective of «Ultimate Expert Specialization» and economical inference: «DeepSeekMoE 145B significantly outperforms Gshard, matching DeepSeek 67B with 28.5% (maybe even 14.6%) computation». For those few who noticed it, this seemed a minor curiosity, or just bullshit.
On 5th February, they've dropped DeepSeekMath,of which I've already spoken: «Approaching Mathematical Reasoning Capability of GPT-4 with a 7B Model». Contra the usual Chinese pattern, it wasn't a lie; no, you couldn't in normal use get remotely as good results from it, but in some constrained regimes… The project itself was a mix of most of the previous steps: sophisticated (and well-explained) data harvesting pipeline, scaling laws experiments, further «longtermist» continued pretraining from Coder-7B-1.5 which itself is a repurposed LLM-7B, and the teased reinforcement learning approach. Numina, winners of AIMO, say «We also experimented with applying our SFT recipe to larger models like InternLM-20B, CodeLama-33B, and Mixtral-8x7B but found that (a) the DeepSeek 7B model is very hard to beat due to its continued pretraining on math…».
In early March they released DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding, reporting some decent results and research on building multimodal systems, and again announcing new plans: «to scale up DeepSeek-VL to larger sizes, incorporating Mixture of Experts technology».
III. Frontier minor league
This far, it's all been preparatory R&D, shared openly and explained eagerly yet barely noticed by anyone (except that the trusty Coder still served as base for labs like Microsoft Research to experiment on): utterly overshadowed in discussions by Alibaba, Meta, Mistral, to say nothing of frontier labs.
But on May 6th, 2024, the pieces began to fall into place. They released «DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model», which subsumed all aforementioned works (except VL).
It's… unlike any other open model, to the point you could believe it was actually made by some high-IQ finance bros from first principles. Its design choices are exquisite, just copying minor details can substantially improve on typical non-frontier efforts. It pushes further their already unorthodox MoE and tops it off with a deep, still poorly understood modification to the attention mechanism (Multi-head Latent Attention, or MLA). It deviates from industry-standard rotary position embeddings to accomodate the latter (a fruit of collaboration with RoPE's inventor). It's still so unconventional that we are only beginning to figure out how to run it properly (they don't share their internal pipeline, which is optimized for hardware they can access given American sanctions). But in retrospect, it's the obvious culmination of the vision announced with those first model releases and goofy tweets, probably a vision not one year old, and yet astonishingly far-sighted – especially given how young their star researchers are. But probably it's mundane in the landscape of AI that's actually used; I suspect it's close to how Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 1.5 Pro work on the inside. It's just that the open-source peasants are still mucking around with stone age dense models on their tiny consumer GPUs.
I understand I might already be boring you out of your mind, but just to give you an idea of how impressive this whole sequence is, here's a 3rd April paper for context:
Recent developments, such as Mixtral (Jiang et al., 2024), DeepSeek-MoE (Dai et al., 2024), spotlight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models as a superior alternative to Dense Transformers. An MoE layer works by routing each input token to a selected group of experts for processing. Remarkably, increasing the number of experts in an MoE model (almost) does not raise the computational cost, enabling the model to incorporate more knowledge through extra parameters without inflating pre-training expenses… Although our findings suggest a loss-optimal configuration with Emax experts, such a setup is not practical for actual deployment. The main reason is that an excessive number of experts makes the model impractical for inference. In contrast to pretraining, LLM inference is notably memory-intensive, as it requires storing intermediate states (KV-cache) of all tokens. With more experts, the available memory for storing KV caches is squeezed. As a result, the batch size – hence throughput – decreases, leading to increased cost per query. … We found that MoE models with 4 or 8 experts exhibit more efficient inference and higher performance compared to MoE models with more experts. However, they necessitate 2.4x-4.3x more training budgets to reach the same performance with models with more experts, making them impractical from the training side.
This is basically where Mistral.AI, the undisputed European champion with Meta and Google pedigree (valuation $6.2B), the darling of the opensource community, stands.
And yet, apparently DeepSeek have found a way to get out of the bind. «4 or 8»? They scale to 162 experts, reducing active parameters to 21B, cutting down pretraining costs by 42.5% and increasing peak generation speed by 5.76x; and they scale up the batch size via compressing the KV cache by like 15 times with a bizarre application of low-rank projections and dot attention; and while doing so they cram in 3x more attention heads than any model this size has any business having (because their new attention decouples number of heads from cache size), and so kick the effective «thinking intensity» up a notch, beating the gold standard «Multihead attention» everyone has been lousily approximating; and they use a bunch of auxiliary losses to make the whole thing maximally cheap to use on their specific node configuration.
But the cache trick is pretty insane. The hardest-to-believe, for me, part of the whole thing. Now, 2 months later, we know that certain Western groups ought to have reached the same Pareto frontier, just with different (maybe worse, maybe better) tradeoffs. But those are literally inventors and/or godfathers of the Transformer – Noam Shazeer's CharacterAI, Google Deepmind's Gemini line… This is done by folks like this serious-looking 5th year Ph.D student, in under a year!
As a result, they:
- use about as much compute on pretraining as Meta did on Llama-3-8B, an utter toy in comparison (maybe worth $2.5 million for them); 1/20th of GPT-4.
- Get a 236B model that's about as good across the board as Meta's Llama-3-70B (≈4x more compute), which has the capacity – if not the capability – of mid-range frontier models (previous Claude 3 Sonnet; GPT-4 on a bad day).
- Can serve it at around the price of 8B, $0.14 for processing 1 million tokens of input and $0.28 for generating 1 million tokens of output (1 and 2 Yuan), on previous-gen hardware too.
- …and still take up to 70%+ gross margins, because «On a single node with 8 H800 GPUs, DeepSeek-V2 achieves a generation throughput exceeding 50K tokens per second… In addition, the prompt input throughput of DeepSeek-V2 exceeds 100K tokens per second», and the going price for such nodes is ≤$15/hr. That's $50 in revenue, for clarity. They aren't doing a marketing stunt.
- …and so they force every deep-pocketed mediocre Chinese LLM vendor – Alibaba, Zhipu and all – to drop prices overnight, now likely serving at a loss.
Now, I am less sure about some parts of this story; but mostly it's verifiable.
I can see why an American, or a young German like Leopold, would freak out about espionage. The thing is, their papers are just too damn good and too damn consistent over the entire period if you look back (as I did), so «that's it, lock the labs» or «haha, no more tokens 4 u» is most likely little more than racist cope for the time being. The appropriate reaction would be more akin to «holy shit Japanese cars are in fact good».
Smart people (Jack Clark from Anthropic, Dylan Patel of Semianalysis) immediately take note. Very Rational people clamoring for AI pause (TheZvi) sneer and downplay: «This is who we are worried about?» (as he did before, and before). But it is still good fun. Nothing extreme. There slowly begin efforts at adoption: say, Salesforce uses V2-Chat to create synthetic data to finetune small Deepseek-Coder V1s to outperform GPT-4 on narrow tasks. Mostly nobody cares.
The paper ends in the usual manner of cryptic comments and commitments:
We thank all those who have contributed to DeepSeek-V2 but are not mentioned in the paper. DeepSeek believes that innovation, novelty, and curiosity are essential in the path to AGI.
DeepSeek will continuously invest in open-source large models with longtermism, aiming to progressively approach the goal of artificial general intelligence.
• In our ongoing exploration, we are dedicated to devising methods that enable further scaling up MoE models while maintaining economical training and inference costs. The goal of our next step is to achieve performance on par with GPT-4 in our upcoming release.
In the Appendix, you can find a lot of curious info, such as:
During pre-training data preparation, we identify and *filter out contentious content, such as values influenced by regional cultures, to avoid our model exhibiting unnecessary subjective biases on these controversial topics. Consequently, we observe that DeepSeek-V2 performs slightly worse on the test sets that are closely associated with specific regional cultures. For example, when evaluated on MMLU, although DeepSeek-V2 achieves comparable or superior performance on the majority of testsets compared with its competitors like Mixtral 8x22B, it still lags behind on the Humanity-Moral subset, which is mainly associated with American values.
Prejudices of specific regional cultures aside, though, it does have values – true, Middle Kingdom ones, such as uncritically supporting the Party line and adherence to Core Values Of Socialism (h/t @RandomRanger). The web version will also delete the last message if you ask something too clever about Xi or Tiananmen or… well, nearly the entirety of usual things Americans want to talk to Chinese coding-oriented LLMs about.
And a bit earlier, this funny guy from the team presented at Nvidia's GTC24 with the product for the general case – «culturally sensitive», customizable alignment-on-demand: «legality of rifle» for the imperialists, illegality of Tibet separatism for the civilized folk. Refreshingly frank.
But again, even that was just a preparatory.
IV. Coming at the king
Roughly 40 days later they release DeepSeek-V2-Coder: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence, where they return to the strategy announced at the very start: they take an intermediate checkpoint of V2, and push it harder and further on the dataset enriched with code and math (that that've continued to expand and refine), for 10.2 trillion tokens total. Now this training run is 60% more expensive than Llama-3-8B (still a pittance by modern standards). It also misses out on some trivia knowledge and somehow becomes even less charismatic. It's also not a pleasant experience because the API runs very slowly, probably from congestion (I guess Chinese businesses are stingy… or perhaps DeepSeek is generating a lot of synthetic data for next iterations). Anons on 4chan joke that it's «perfect for roleplaying with smart, hard-to-get characters».
More importantly though, it demolishes Llama-3-70B on every task that takes nontrivial intelligence; bests Claude 3 Opus on coding and math throughout, Gemini 1.5-Pro on most coding assistance, and trades blows with the strongest GPT-4 variants. Of course it's the same shape and the same price, which is to say, up to 100 times cheaper than its peers… more than 100 times, in the case of Opus. Still a bitch to run, but it turns out they're selling turnkey servers. In China, of course. To boot, they rapidly shipped running code in browser (a very simple feature but going most of the way to Claude Artifacts that wowed people do much), quadrupled context length without price changes (32k to 128k) and now intend to add context caching that Google boasts of as some tremendous Gemini breakthrough. They have... Impressive execution.
Benchmarks, from the most sophisticated and hard to hack to the most bespoke and obscure, confirm that it's «up there».
- Aider (2nd, 1st at release)
- LMSYS Arena (low on Overall, but 5th rank on Coding and 7 ranks above Google and Meta's open source alternatives, respectively 11th and 3+ ranks above on Hard subsample)
- Arena-Hard-Auto(7th, surprisingly 2 more Chinese models narrowly get ahead)
- %compilable Golang programs (2nd)
- Livebench (7th, by virtue of being 5th-6th in coding and reasoning and 2nd in Math; everyone above is OpenAI/Anthropic)
- LiveCodeBench (4th, same order)
- BigCodeBench(2nd)
- Gaokao-Math, released days before its deployment (roughly above GPT-4o)
Etc etc, and crucially, users report similar impressions:
So I have pegged deepseek v2 coder against sonnet 3.5 and gpt4o in my coding tasks and it seems to be better than gpt4o (What is happening at OpenAI) and very similar to Sonnet 3.5. The only downside is the speed, it's kinda slow. Very good model and the price is unbeatable.
I had the same experience, this is a very good model for serious tasks. Sadly the chat version is very dry and uncreative for writing. Maybe skill issue, I do not know. It doesn't feel slopped, it's just.. very dry. It doesn't come up with things.
Some frustrating weak points, but they know of those, and conclude:
Although DeepSeek-Coder-V2 achieves impressive performance on standard benchmarks, we find that there is still a significant gap in instruction-following capabilities compared to current state-of-the-art models like GPT-4 Turbo. This gap leads to poor performance in complex scenarios and tasks such as those in SWEbench. […] In the future, we will focus more on improving the model’s instruction-following capabilities…
Followed by the list of 338 supported languages.
Well-read researchers say stuff like
DeepSeek-Coder-V2 is by far the best open-source math (+ coding) model, performing on par with GPT4o w/o process RM or MCTS and w/ >20x less training compute. Data contamination doesn't seem to be a concern here. Imagine about what this model could achieve with PRM, MCTS, and other yet-to-be-released agentic exploration methods. Unlike GPT4o, you can train this model further. It has the potential to solve Olympiad, PhD and maybe even research level problems, like the internal model a Microsoft exec said to be able to solve PhD qualifying exam questions».
Among the Rational, there is some cautious realization («This is one of the best signs so far that China can do something competitive in the space, if this benchmark turns out to be good»), in short order giving way to more cope : «Arena is less kind to DeepSeek, giving it an 1179, good for 21st and behind open model Gemma-2-9B».
And one more detail: A couple weeks ago, they released code and paper on Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning, «which tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts and modules; experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves the efficiency, but also matches or even surpasses the performance of full-parameter fine-tuning … by showing less performance degradation [in general tasks]». It seems to require that «ultimate expert specialization» design of theirs, with its supporting beam of generalist modules surrounded by meaningfully task-specific shards, to automatically select only the parts pertaining to some target domain; and this isn't doable with traditional dense of MoE designs. Once again: confident vision, bearing fruit months later. I would like to know who's charting their course, because they're single-handedly redeeming my opinion of the Chinese AI ecosystem and frankly Chinese culture.
V. Where does this leave us?
This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history. A month ago they've precluded a certain level of safetyist excess and corporate lock-in that still seemed possible in late 2023, when the argument that public availability of ≈GPT-4 level weights (with the main imaginary threat vectors being coding/reasoning-bottlenecked) could present intolerable risks was discussed in earnest. One-two more such leaps and we're… there, for the vague libertarian intuition of «there» I won't elucidate now. But they're already not sharing the silently updated Deepseek-V2-Chat (that somewhat improved its reasoning, getting closer to the Coder), nor the promised materials on DeepSeek-Prover (a quiet further development of their mathematical models line). Maybe it's temporary. Maybe they've arrived to where they wanted to be, and will turtle up like Stability and Mistral, and then likely wither away.
Mostly, I honestly just think it's remarkable that we're getting an excellent, practically useful free model with lowkey socialist sensibilities. Sadly, I do not foresee that this will inspire Western groups to accelerate open source and leave them in the dust. As Google says in Gemma-2 report:
Despite advancements in capabilities, we believe that given the number of larger and more powerful open models, this release will have a negligible effect on the overall risk landscape.
Less charitably, Google is not interested in releasing anything you might use to enhance your capabilities and become less dependent on Google or other «frontier company», and will only release it if you are well able of getting better stuff elsewhere. In my view, this is closer to the core value of Socialism than withholding info about Xinjiang reeducation camps.
I remain agnostic about the motivations and game plan of DeepSeek, but I do hope they'll maintain this policy of releasing models «with longtermism», as it were. We don't have many others to rely on.
Edits: minor fixes
The trip to the states was mostly uneventful, but I will document it here for posterity and to get my own head around it.
My wife and I decided to visit my hometown briefly to see my parents’ graves, and to let our boys experience a bit of where I am from, before there is no longer any reason to go back there. There barely is now, but that is another story. We left Japan on a mild but chilly Christmas day, arriving on Christmas night, and returned via Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, though our arrival was such that in Japan on touchdown it was already January 2nd. So the day of January 1st we lost somewhere in the air. This is an account of that journey and the impressions that I got. Please opt out now if this sort of post is not your thing.
People don’t seem as fat as in previous visits. Admittedly we did not get out to Wal Mart, though Target still has the bizarre posters in the women’s clothing section that have women who are not just fairly overweight (at least by my standards), but deformed. By that I mean that at least one model had visible stretch marks and even scars from what appeared to be poorly healed abdominal injuries, possibly from a stab or bullet wound. I’m not kidding. I will admit that I just don’t get it. Compare that to your typical similar ad in Japan. In any case, apart from the advertisements, in the few restaurants we visited, people just weren’t as obese as I remember. Maybe semaglutide is doing its thing. All hail Ozempic.
So the fatness seemed reduced. Trimmed. My southern home state was overcast and gray and the trees dun-colored the whole time we were there. Not even southern gothic, more like something out of Steinbeck, enough to drive any sane person in-. Generally the weather was not as warm as I remember this time of year, though by no means freezing, with temperatures in the 50s (F). All in all it felt like something out of the film version of The Road, without the roving bands of cannibals. Maybe if I had driven to Gadsden.
Drivers drove fast. I was given a big black Chevy Tahoe by Hertz because they had no SUVs. The Chevrolet Tahoe is a large vehicle with controls in the form of a dial you twist from R to P to D to N. There is no gearshift on the column or floor. Is this a normal thing now? Dials and buttons. At least there was a steering wheel and the gas and brake pedals were as expected. It is also a large vehicle, at least for me. I felt like I was driving a computerized and de-weaponized tank. But drive it I did.
From the airport I drove us a half hour or so to my aunt’s. She scolded me for not phoning her from the airport. At her home were pictures from my past, and baubles on the shelf that I remember having been at my grandmother’s house when I was a boy. My aunt is old and frail and said she fell and can’t lift her arm above around here. She had some devilled eggs and cold ham for us, both dishes that I hate and would rather be shot than eat. I said we weren’t hungry, which was a lie. I dislike lying but apparently I am willing to do it. The next morning I made us all pancakes from some batter my aunt had, to which you just add water—no milk or eggs or anything, just water then you pour it onto butter on a hot skillet and flip, and there are your pancakes. I felt like I was eating something Captain Kirk might eat on the Enterprise. She put bacon into her oven on some sort of special grease-catching pan. “It’s healthier this way,” she said, though I have never wanted or expected bacon to have any health benefits, nor have I cared if it did. Because it’s bacon, ffs. She cooked it to hell and back and if you held up a piece it stood erect like a long, fried pig crackling instead of the floppy bacon I am now familiar with in Japan. I crunched and swallowed it down anyway. Her coffee machine had no filter. “I ran out,” she said. Somehow we made coffee anyway, but it was decaf, because of her heart. Outside she has a dog, a rescue mutt that will bite you if you offer it your hand. I heard but did not see it. Somehow she feeds it. It dislikes her boyfriend, whom her crazy daughter dislikes. I want to shake the daughter, my cousin, until, as they say, she comes to her senses. My aunt is 82 and has a boyfriend. What sort of derangement would want to deprive her of this?
The next day we said bye to my aunt and hugged her, and I drove an hour to my hometown through the overcast gray depressing weather. “Is that a dead deer?” asked my wife. It was, on the side of the road. There would be more than one, as well as other, less identifiable roadkill, but she stopped asking after the first time. Some of the road signs on the way were different, the towns having shrunk or others grown so that the relevant placenames people presumably want to turn off the exit to had changed. Once I arrived, the roads that I used to know well seem to have been diverted at key points. In one instance I was going in the opposite direction from where I had intended, on a road I thought I was familiar with. The best restaurants of my youth were all closed forever, but there seemed to be more Mexican places. The indoor mall from my childhood looked as if it had been bombed out. The new indoor mall from my teenage years we did not visit. But there is an outdoor area with lots of shops and a Planet Fitness and a large Barnes & Noble and Panera and some ramen shop called FUKU ramen, a name which amuses me. This outdoor mall-type place seems to be the new place people go. I had a poor meal at a diner there, though the mashed potatoes were good. I used my phone’s GPS to find at least one address in my own hometown, something I never used to have to do. The university is still quite striking, and the stadium has reached gargantuan proportions, though, from what I understand, college football is now fucked.
One general point of interest was that we did not have any particularly bad interactions with service personnel, which is usually something that happens almost immediately upon landing, if not in the cabin of the plane, once we have switched to an American carrier. No, this time everyone was pleasant and even efficient. Possibly because of the time of year. I was called “baby” by the first woman I interacted with at a coffee shop, but this possibly because I put on my friendly affect in my southern accent (though this was in LAX), which seemed to cause her to warm to me. I don’t mind this familiarity and in fact I welcome it. In Japan I’m treated with smiles and fawning courtesy, but as often as not this is complete tatemae and can give one a feeling of being in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Assuming anyone here knows what the hell that even means. It can be weird, that’s my point. In the US there’s more of an authenticity—I don’t expect the woman behind the counter to lend me money or ask me to dinner at her house, but I know that should I say something off-script, her reaction will be genuine. I do not know if I am getting my point across clearly. My southern cadence is also coming out.
At one point my youngest son, who had seen something on Youtube about Papa John’s (the pizza place), asked if we could get a pizza there. I said sure. It was raining and I was already tired of driving us everywhere, but there on the corner was a Papa John’s so I pulled over. I walked in and immediately saw the sign: “No walk-in orders. Online or phone only.” I asked the bespectacled, tired-looking dishwater blonde woman if that meant I could not order there. She affirmed that this was true. Playing along with this bizarre policy, I walked outside and tried to make a call. For some reason my phone wasn’t working, so my oldest son got out of the car with his iPhone, which was, and I tried to go online and order through the website. Due to the Japanese phone settings possibly, the phone would not take us to the web location we wanted. I tried calling again, and this time was met with a computerized voice instructing me to press 3. Which I did. Then it hung up on me. This story is far longer but the gist is we did not get the Papa John’s pizza.
We stayed at a friend’s house, which he now rents. Back in the day he lived in the house, and in fact it is the house in which he (a priest) married my wife and me. Now the house is professionally decorated, with original art, and, on some flat surfaces, three stacked books upon which fake plants sit. I did not like this touch—books are for reading or for being on shelves, not for supporting fake plants. But the beds were nice, and it was of course generous of him to offer us the stay.
We visited my best friend, and his father and large family for their Christmas to-do. His father is 92, and far more jovial than I remember from my youth. “Take your boys in there to my trophy room,” he suggested. I did. There were many deer antlers on the wall--racks, he called them--and a scoped rifle in a glass case. I do not know what kind of rifle. There was a bunch of food including a tray of buttered corn kernels and what I seem to remember being a tray of meatballs, which seems odd, but none of us ate because our times were all messed up still. I was offered a Miller Lite in a can and drank it gratefully even though I was about to drive us all to the airport. Because hey, such behavior is legal there. My friend’s son showed us pictures on his phone of various dead animals that he had killed over the years. In one there was a giant wild boar on the back of a truckbed, which he kept calling a pig. I was told there was a wild black bear somewhere in Alabama that was caught on some security camera in city limits. “What happened to it?” I asked. No one seemed to know.
In Houston on layover, we were stuck on the tarmac. For eight hours. Again, I am not kidding. Apparently, there was lightning in the vicinity and every time there is a lightning strike, takeoff is delayed 8 minutes. Or something like that. There was a very pretty Mexican girl in a red sweater and jeans next to me who apparently also spoke French. We talked several times over the eight hours, though I did not try to pursue extended conversation. In my younger, unmarried years, I would have. They deplaned us once, then re-planed us. They kept delaying us with excuses, and apologies. At one point the crew was replaced with a new crew, who were mildly more smiley. A very tattooed man with his cat in a cat carrier sat a few rows in front of me, but opted out of the flight when they offered, and left the plane, delaying us further. One woman was forcibly ejected for acting out, and we watched her storm out the plane door, to a fate I can only guess (staying in Houston is a good bet). Eight hours is a damn long time to sit in a plane that isn’t moving, especially when there isn’t even a terrorist with a gun or bomb keeping you there. Anyway we eventually took off (to applause, which I led) and got to LA. When I disembarked, the Mexican girl had gone ahead of me and was standing at the gate waiting for her boyfriend, and when I tried to catch her eye in hopes that maybe there would be a smile of recognition, she did not look at me. Women are interesting creatures and I love them.
In LA because of the 8-hour arrival delay when we were dropped at the Remote Rental Car place it was dark and there was no one there. Metro buses and cars whizzed by dispassionately. When I called the company I got a machine. My wife kept saying it was cold. I called our hotel, and they suggested an Uber, which we ordered, and took us about 30 minutes. The driver, a guy named Marvin, did not speak except in low murmurs but he got us where we wanted to go. We ate at Denny’s beside the hotel and I had the best burger I have had in years there. The waitress brought me a small carafe of coffee and I had four servings in a very satisfying heavy white mug, despite the hour (it was now 11:15 pm). The hotel itself was shabbier than in the photos when I had booked it, and you could look at the carpets and tell thousands of people had trod over them, probably with dirty ass shoes. But the room was roomy and the beds comfortable and the shower powerful and hot. The staff were all very friendly and helpful and female.
The next day across the street to the hotel we saw our first crazy homeless person, a man in what appeared to be velvet overalls who kept screaming at something. My sons were very interested, like whale-watchers who see their first sounding. I managed a refund from the rental and got yet another Uber (driver: Luis, born in Portugal, spent many years on fishing boats) to drive us to a new agency, where we were given a mini-Van, with more dials and buttons.
In LA we did Universal Studios. The backlot tour featured lots of old movies my sons had never seen, and the driver touted television shows I have never watched. The Harry Potter ride is the same as the one in Universal Studios Japan, but Hermione speaks English in the Hollywood version. The Jurassic World ride is splashy and made me colder than I already was. In the provided photo I have my hoodie up and am looking off camera. The lines were painfully long. I ate a hot dog and my sons had tacos with carne asada where the meat to my taste was rather gamey. When I considered buying a Griffindor necktie my wife made several comments that caused me to reconsider not only buying the tie (I did not) but also my maturity level and general life choices. We ate at Bubba Gump shrimp where the gumbo was good though my wife found it overly salty. The table next to us celebrated the birthday of a boy who had long frilly hair and whose brother was extremely ugly and also had poofy hair. Someday perhaps they will identify as female, though perhaps by then the world will refuse to acknowledge this. We were not assigned one waiter but several, which seemed odd. They all introduced themselves by name so I called them by these names, which my son thought was rude of me. My wife had a margarita at every restaurant that served them. The best, she announced, was the pineapple jalapeño one, which I tasted and it was cold and strong.
I drove us by El Coyote, the last restaurant Sharon Tate visited before she was brutally murdered in 1969 by Tex Watson and his crazy cohort. I had planned to go in and eat there, but it seemed ghoulish and I suddenly had a change of heart. I’ve always had a thing for Sharon Tate. We drove up to the Griffith Observatory which reminded me but no one else of Rebel Without a Cause. Natalie Wood died before she reached the age I am now. I remember the morning when I discovered she died—Good Morning America or whatever was announcing it as I got ready for school. I was 13, and it rattled me greatly that she was gone. I still suspect Wagner had something to do with it, that fucker. We had, at last, In and Out burgers, which I had always wanted to try. The fries were underwhelming but the burgers were fine. We walked on the Santa Monica pier which was full of foreigners speaking non-English but was otherwise exactly how I remembered it. I taught my sons the smell of marijuana, which we smelled on a continual basis the entire time we were in LA. I took a photo of Mark Hamill’s star on the walk of fame, a photo I will probably never look at again. Some guy in a terribly put together Chewbacca get-up walked past us. I bought a bright red MAGA hat off a guy on the street for my Harris-supporting friend back in Japan, because I am an asshole. When I told the guy selling the hats this, he threw in a flag of Kamala Harris for free. The man selling the hats was black, and fist-bumped me as I left. Sometimes I love America to the point I feel like weeping. I wish other Americans did. Or maybe my testosterone is waning in my age.
We heard many languages in LA. Many women had far too much plastic surgery, which, for me, is any at all. In one of many lines we stood in, a girl behind us was probably one of the most exquisitely beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen in person. Blonde hair, blue eyes, perfect teeth, a natural, unaffected beauty. She wore some sort of sweater and black yoga pants and sneakers and was with her aunt, probably. I am sometimes reminded in moments like this that really pretty blonde women have an amazing power at that age (mid-20s probably) that will fade eventually, but is mighty when and while they have it. A gift from God. What must it be like in Scandinavia, where blondes are a dime a dozen? Anyway they’d all be taller than me there. On the KTLA news the announcers were also strikingly pretty, but in a too done-up way. Like if you saw them in reality you’d think Wow you spent a lot of time getting ready. At the Lakers/Cavaliers game the Lakers lost, but Austin Reaves sunk 32 points. He looked average height from our seat but is 6’5”. My sons were happy to watch Lebron James and Rui Hachimura. Beers cost 22 dollars. Damn right I bought one.
We saw no celebrities, though my sons thought they saw a famous Japanese person in a donut shop. Speaking of doughnut shops my wife had her first “Hot Now” Krispy Kreme in my hometown. She said it was the best doughnut she had ever had and was outraged that they did not have these in Japan (the hot now versions). I remember a time before they had the Hot Now sign and you just sometimes got freshly made ones. I grew up with a Krispy Kreme next to my elementary school and used to go watch the doughnuts move on the conveyor belt through the glaze. They’re good with hot coffee and very, very sweet. I remember eating a few at a time when younger but couldn’t eat more than one now without feeling diabetes set in.
My parents graves were clean, and the gravestone legible and newish, with both their names and everything filled in. It was, again, an overcast day the day we went, but the small town had only changed slightly--many of the old two-story beautiful homes were still there, probably inherited and for some reason still maintained. I hadn’t bought any flowers as everywhere was still closed on December 26th. So I just stood there. I always wondered and dreaded, before they died, what it would be like when my parents were gone, and now I can’t help thinking that my own sons will have to lose their parents as well, meaning me, me and my wife, who hopefully will outlive me by many years. I wish for a quick death, sudden, shocking maybe but without the long drawn out heaving and gasping that was the fate of my own parents, whom I judge in my adult mind but unquestionably still loved. We are all so careless with one another, really.
There is more to this, but I’m not going to write it. Thanks for getting this far.
Preamble (pre ramble?)
Almost a year ago I married a girl who is either a first or second generation Chinese American depending on how you count people who came over as young kids. Over the years I have met many of her relatives, now my in-laws, that lived or made trips to the US. The time has come to meet those who do not and did not. To my great shame I do not speak Chinese.
We're going along with my wife's nuclear family. My mother-in-law and father-in-law, hence MIL and FIL, and her younger sister. The sister is 14 years younger than her and a natural born US citizen. The gap is a result of the one-child policy. While my wife goes by her Anglicized name, her sister prefers using her Chinese one. She's pretty sharp, doing her undergrad right now with plans of going to law school. She talks and acts like you'd expect of any American Zoomer. I think she feels her Chinese identity is a little more precarious and clings to it a little more tightly as a result.
The extended family is mostly in Nanjing and a little bit in Shanghai. The plan is relatively simple: fly into Shanghai through Hong Kong, take the train to Nanjing, meet people for a few days, train back to Shanghai, meet other people, then me and the wife are spending a couple of days in Osaka, Japan on the way back with an old buddy of mine. That's the short plan. The long plan is outlined in meticulous detail in Chinese on a Google Docs form by MIL.
This series of posts will be something like a travel log, or trog.
Hong Kong
The first few days are relatively uneventful. Me and the wife fly separately to Hong Kong. The flight is probably half white and half Chinese people. We sit separately and I don't sleep a wink, sandwiched between two other guys. The website hadn't been willing to accept our visas so I couldn't check in before getting to the airport, so we were left with the bottom-of-the-barrel choice of seats. Despite this, paying $25 for in-flight internet makes the flight fly by as I let the best social media slop our finest engineers can serve melt my brain into a timeless stasis. Time travel is real; it just only goes one way.
We spend around 13 hours in Hong Kong, most of them sleeping. We didn't have enough time to get out into the city proper but we did manage to grab a meal and explore the 7-11 in the airport. For European readers, as they are mostly a North American and apparently Asian chain, 7-11s are convenience stores, frequently gas stations. Think Apu's store from The Simpsons. In America they're not highly thought of, mainly notable for their "slurpee" carbonated slushy machines. However, apparently 7-11 has a social media presence in Asia unlike its presence in the West.
I was once told for international travel that if you're staying long enough in a country it is interesting to try their local Chinese food because it's so variable and the diaspora adapts the food to the local palate. Within Asia this is supposedly how one should think about 7-11s. We bought a couple of Hong Kong-specific pastries and Tsingtao beer. It's an opportunity to verify if I set up WeChat Pay correctly. The beer is a pale lager that I have had before in the States; it's crisp and refreshing.
Shanghai
The next morning we fly to Shanghai and take the local subway to our hotel near the main shopping district. When buying tickets we put one of our 100-yuan bills, worth around $14, in to buy our 8-yuan worth of tickets. The machine instantly shut off and declared itself out of order after dispensing the tickets. No change provided. We learned not to trust machines going forward but as far as lessons go this one was relatively cheap. Supposedly the hotel we stayed at was one of the places Nixon stayed when he did whatever it was only Nixon could do. I was assured our room was not wiretapped. Every time we stopped at a new hotel we needed to present our passports and they recorded our movements into some system. We had a few hours to kill as we waited for the rest of her family to arrive so we strolled down the shopping street to a place called The Bund where one can see a skyline over the bay.
The shopping street is huge and packed. Scattered about are college-aged Chinese people in cosplay. My wife says she doesn't think there is any particular event. It's a Saturday and people just do that sometimes. Every once in a while we see a young, attractive woman in some elaborate dress or makeup with a personal photographer taking staged photos. Where cross traffic is allowed on the strip, the roads are dominated by scooters.
The shops themselves extend three stories up for most of the strip that goes on for at least a mile and in places five or six stories up. It's easily three times as dense as Chicago's Michigan Ave. White people are still regular enough that my presence only attracts minor glances and increased attention by the street vendors. The shops are about an even mix between Western and mainland brands. The food is mostly mainland with a smattering of brands like McDonald's, KFC, and, to my surprise, Pizza Hut. Apparently, the localized phonetic characters for Pizza Hut translate to something like "home of the winners". Eventually, at around 10pm, her parents arrived and we went in search of dinner. We had reservations at a hotpot place they described as "reputable". There were probably ten hot pot places in a block and somehow this was one of the only ones with zero signs.
Her parents execute a basic strategy when going anywhere in China: they ask random people on the street where to go for their destination and go that direction until they run into another random stranger to ask. They prioritize police officers and workers but if none are available they'll ask just about any person on the street. This sounds like a viable strategy but so far the results have been significantly worse than using a mapping app. We spent probably 30 minutes wandering around a block, walking through alleys, asking random people where this specific hotpot place was. Eventually, I'm confident through the process of elimination, we tried an unmarked door beside a KFC and found an elevator to our destination.
For those who don't know, hotpot is a kind of communal meal where everyone sits around a hot pot—almost all Chinese names are this literal—full of various flavored broths. You dump things in to cook over time but most centrally you take your chopsticks, pick up some thin-sliced frozen meat and dip them in until cooked, usually 20-ish seconds. Then you dip them in a sauce of your own design and eat.
Racism against white people is usually tame and harmless. As long as it doesn't hold an accusation of wrongdoing I take it in stride. One exception is the idea that we cannot handle spices. This is a harmful untruth that has been used to deny me and my people the flavor we deserve. We subjugated most of the globe in search of spices, and yet our spice lust is denied. The staff at this hotpot place wore devil horns and served us a sour plum juice along with broth that was maybe mild.
Bellies full and bodies jetlagged, we made it back to the hotel. The AC in our room was busted but we were too tired to care and fell asleep quickly. The next day we woke up for the breakfast buffet. Like much of the city, the spread was half Western and half Chinese. The buffet was well attended and for the first hour there were two white guys in the hall and we were both wearing orange polos. After breakfast we walked through the People's Park. They have an advanced form of analog Tinder. There are hundreds or thousands of essentially dating profiles on laminated sheets of printer paper laid out on the path. There are sections for foreign matches and all sorts of categories. Some have phone numbers; some are tended by the prospective matches or, more commonly, their parents, uncles, or aunts. According to the wife, the women greatly outnumber the men. It wasn't clear to me why, given the sex imbalance should lean the other way.
Next we visit the Yu Yuan Park. It's a neat estate with essentially ornate 1700s-era meeting rooms and rock parks. The park is attached to a huge marketplace selling every trinket or bauble you can imagine. One of my quests was to find a couple of copies of Mao's Little Red Book as a souvenir for me and a buddy who I knew would also appreciate one. Unfortunately, the one shop that had them only had German and French versions. I want either a Chinese or English version. The in-laws offered to order one for me but there is a kind of vulgar poetry to haggling for one with a street vendor that holds a special appeal to me.
We grab lunch in the form of XLBs. These are soup-filled dumplings, in this case a crab meat version the area is known for. For good measure we also pick up a couple of pan-fried baos and spring rolls from another shop. It's a warm day so I pop into a 7-11 and pick up a couple of slurpees. They come in 12-ounce cups. China has advanced much over the last few decades but they are not yet ready for the 44-ounce variant available to more advanced nations. Maybe next generation. Slurpees in hand, we took the train back to get our bags from the hotel and then headed to the train station to take high-speed rail to Nanjing. We arrive early and present our passports at the gate to be recorded. When the train arrives, despite the seats being assigned, everyone boards the train in a disorganized rush that I don’t quite understand. The ride to Nanjing is smooth and impressive. I watch out the window as countryside zooms past. The Chinese countryside is not like the American equivalent. There are random clusters of a dozen or so identical 10+ story tall apartment buildings and a smattering of industrial buildings. There are no suburbs; stand-alone single-family homes are rare. Huge factories, complete and operating or under construction, dot the landscape.
Nanjing, the southern capital
We arrive in Nanjing and an uncle picks us up. He's high up in a media organization that, for reasons unexplained to me, owns the hotel we're staying in. His wife is a Party member. These are easily our wealthiest relatives in China.
The Chinese have something of a gift-giving culture. Our bags came over laden with gifts to give out. As a young couple, our obligations aren't so great: some Nike jackets or sweaters for aunts and uncles, slippers and melatonin for grandparents, more specific things for a handful of exceptions. It's somewhat interesting what mainland Chinese people want. Coveted are medicines with what is seen as superior American quality control, brand-name clothing, the kinds of nuts and ingredients one could get at any American big box store.
At the hotel we meet up with the wife of our ride and exchange some gifts. We received a belated wedding gift of several red packets bulging with 100-yuan notes. I feel a little uneasy about taking several thousand yuan from a literal Communist Party member. But she's friendly enough and I'm not here to fight that battle.
Dinner is a bit of an ambush that in hindsight we should have seen coming. We thought we just had normal reservations at the hotel restaurant but it ended up being something like a pseudo-wedding reception. I would have preferred to have dressed better for the occasion but it quickly became apparent that, besides drinking obligations, we were probably among the least important people at the event.
FIL took the head of the table as the head host, surrounded by the other elders of the family and then expanding outwards in accordance with tradition and pragmatism. Naturally, me and my wife were seated not quite at the opposite end, which itself is reserved for an important person, but at the approximate importance of a cousin who had brought her Pomeranian. This is good news; honor is an obligation and we were ill-equipped to bear it, armed only with my wife's vague recollection of tradition.
One thing we did know is that I was expected to drink. The Chinese drink of high occasions is baijiu or white alcohol and the king of baijiu is Moutai. Moutai is approximately 100 proof and drunk in thimble-sized glasses. It tastes and smells relatively sweet and is not cheap, running you around 1500 yuan (around $200) for a 500ml bottle. To waste Moutai is a grave sin. As a relatively young man and the newlywed, it is my duty to drink with every guest, every offered toast, and to continue drinking until the toaster stops.
When not drinking I sat next to a young man around my age who got an undergrad in Syracuse and was pursuing a PhD in computer security. He had opted to not drink anything and was one of the few people able to speak English. I asked what he wanted to do after he finished his PhD and he said anything but computer security. We ended up talking about board/computer games and a little bit into AI alignment. He gave a p(doom) of 95% and Shadowheart was his favorite companion in Baldur's Gate 3.
Some number of hours later, dinner was finished and the last of the guests filtered out and we were compelled to finish the last of the last opened bottle of Moutai. We set an alarm and passed out in the room for another breakfast buffet the next day.
At breakfast it's no longer just a rarity to see another white person. I am the only one. People are definitely looking. Still, the breakfast spread is mixed Western and Chinese. There seems to be a Huawei convention of some sort at the hotel as we leave. Time to visit the wife's two remaining grandmothers and extended family in the countryside.
We leave behind most of the luggage and call two taxis to take us about an hour and a half into one of those clusters of identical ~10-story buildings. We're now well outside the kind of places a Westerner without family would ever find themselves. Locals stare, and kids keep staring even after you stare back. Some of them have never seen a white person in the flesh. I'm not offended by this at all, just an interesting experience. No one is aggressive or rude, just curious. Almost no one here speaks any English unless they've retired from elsewhere. I'm extremely dependent on my wife who does her best to keep me up to speed on conversations. We only stop briefly at her grandmother's house; we'll be back later. First we need to visit her grandfather's grave on her father's side. He passed away a few years ago and my wife has been there since but you're supposed to do it every April if you're local. And if you're not, you just do it whenever you visit.
The cemetery is row after row of essentially upright tablets with the ashes just beneath them. Husband and wife share a tablet; there is a picture of each and the patrilineal offspring's names are laser-etched on them. I don't think there is a way for my name to end up on one of these but I wonder if a Chinese man marries a Western woman how they deal with Latin alphabet names. We decorated the tablet with flowers and plants then took turns kowtowing three times while addressing the dead. It was fine to use English. I introduced myself and thanked him for his part in creating the woman I loved. Then we went to a stall nearby where we lit a fire and tossed fake money to be lit so that he will have money in the afterlife. There’s every variety of bills including good old greenbacks. I was worried that the Chinese afterlife might not accept counterfeit bills so I snuck a real 20-dollar bill into the pyre.
One thing that has fascinated me about Chinese culture is trying to square Chinese Communist ideology with a culture that at every possible angle seems to celebrate success and laud becoming wealthy. I like these people. They strike me as spiritually more American than most of the people I've met in Europe. American rightists would find themselves more at home here than American leftists.
After we finish up we go to meet my FIL's grandmother. She's in her late 80s and my wife, who is a psychiatrist by trade, responded to a question of whether she had early-stage dementia by saying it was definitely not an early stage. Before she forgets who I am she is either able to grasp that I work with computers or in a bank but can't seem to accept their union. When she believes I work at a bank she insists that must mean, as a perk of employment, I get free breakfast, a state of affairs she approves of.
She lives in a grouping of houses somehow tied to some shared ancestor. Everyone in the area seems to be a great aunt or uncle. From the outside the homes look kind of slummy but the interiors are clean and well maintained. Behind her living space is a corridor that is covered but exposed to the elements which leads to a shed and a room that is half dedicated to a chicken coop where she sources fresh eggs and roosters to eat. One unlucky rooster was selected earlier that day to form two of the several dishes we were served for lunch shortly after arriving. Beyond the coop there is an acre or so of well-maintained garden. Last time my wife visited she said they only had an outhouse for a toilet but since then they must have installed a septic system. Most of the people there have scooters or little electric cars to get around.
Lunch is served with a bottle of baijiu and we are joined by a few other family members. Among them is a great uncle who is also in his late 80s and has been deaf and mute since what was described as an antibiotic incident when he was a kid. Despite these setbacks he is in excellent health and appears to do most of the upkeep around the house. After successfully responding to a few of his toasts he takes a liking to me and I feel a kinship with another man who can understand very little of what is said around him. We drink through a bottle of baijiu and my great uncle attempts to retrieve a second bottle from the other room. He nearly achieves success, to the objections of the younger generation, but is eventually disarmed. Although relieved to not be drinking any more at lunch before being made to drink at dinner, I couldn't help but root for him. Eventually we wander out and then are waved into another relative’s house for tea. Supposedly an aunt and uncle but I have no idea how many degrees removed. The man is a retired doctor who used to head a hospital. MIL insists that a while back everyone was moving from the countryside to the city because the entitlements were much better in cities but there's been a reversal in favor of cleaner air and maybe something to do with removing taxes on grown produce and the addition of a farm subsidy 15 years ago. The doctor has what is described as a classic Chinese sword which he claims to use for tai chi and also for protecting himself from bad spirits. It forms a part of a traditional Chinese wall.
After we finish drinking tea there we walk out and FIL shows us around where he grew up while we wait for a ride back to MIL's apartment building. There is a pond he used to catch frogs and fish in as a young kid, under the not-so-responsible supervision of deaf and mute great uncle. There is a sign that says you're not allowed into it anymore for safety reasons, damn liberals. Feral cats are abundant and we run into 4 cats hanging around some trees while two of them work on making a few more. There are plenty of people out and about and I definitely draw some attention.
Back at the MIL's grandma's apartment we have another meal and another bottle of baijiu. An aunt and uncle with their 10-year-old kid join us. The kid practices a little English and welcomes us to Nanjing. He's full of energy and eats quickly. After an hour or so he is sent to the other room to do homework while we continue drinking. Some of the conversations as they're translated for me are almost comically familiar. One uncle notes that not everyone really needs to go to college. The trades are a good career path for many and aren't encouraged enough. Another uncle mentions that the rich have an unfair leg up in schooling.
We receive a few more gifts. I get a set of Buddhist prayer beads made of a black wood that smells nice. The set comes with a scroll that explains in Chinese the significance. My wife gets a fat Buddha bracelet. Supposedly this is a particularly fat version of Buddha that is able to absorb all the bad things in the world into his enormous stomach. We also receive some paintings that are claimed to be from a famous ancient artist and come in official-looking packets. He paid twenty yuan for each one and he is the only one that seems to be convinced they aren't forgeries. I later learn one of his favorite pastimes is buying dubious items on a Chinese bidding site. In any case, they were definitely made by a Chinese artist which makes them authentic enough for me.
MIL, FIL, and sister-in-law will all sleep at grandma's. Uncle drives me and the wife to the nearby hotel that he has a connection with where we stay the night.
The next day we wake up and after a quick breakfast at grandma's we go to MIL's grandfather's grave to repeat a similar ritual. On the way MIL points out the area she grew up and the land that her grand father used to own. The story goes that before the cultural revolution her grandfather got really sick and needed antibiotics. Hard to come by in semi rural China in I think the 50s? They ended up selling a bunch of land off to buy them only for him to die anyways. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the family might have fared worse during the revolution if they still owned all the land.
This time we have more company and a relative who is a Buddhist monk chants while we burn not just the paper money but a set of clothing and some paper representations of gold bars and a tea set. The monk had originally been part of an order but during the Cultural Revolution they shut down his group so he got married and had kids. At some point the restrictions slackened and he's back to performing rituals as a job.
During the part where we kowtow and speak to the dead I said it was an honor to be introduced and that if fortune is favorable we'd introduce him to another on our next visit. Every kid or parent that did the ritual devoted at least some of their dialogue to asking for good grades. After the ritual we all went to get lunch at a restaurant where, of course, more baijiu was shared.
I'm publishing this on the road to our next destination. I will probably edit this when I get home and add pictures either in a substack or X post. I'm trying to give more of an impression than a polished essay.
It's three-something in the morning, an ungodly hour by any definition, when my phone rings. It's not on silent. I'm not allowed to keep it on silent tonight, because tonight I'm on what older generations called "beeper duty." To my generation, it's being on call. I am a junior Assistant District Attorney for Metropolis, and that means I get to spend one week a month on call. For that week, when I get home from work, my phone is set to ring at maximum volume, and when it rings, I answer. No exceptions. Sometimes the voice on the other end of the line is a beat cop asking an inane question about some esoteric piece of criminal procedure because he doesn't want to screw up his bust. I try and tell myself that I like those calls, because at least that means the arrest won't get tossed by a judge in a month while me or one of my coworkers stands there helplessly and the cop glares daggers at me because somehow I should have waved my magic wand to un-fuck his fuck-up. Sometimes the voice is a detective, asking about an emergency warrant to be executed right the fuck now so I had better get the on-call judge up. Those calls are more exciting, but still fairly routine.
This time the voice identifies itself as Detective Smith.
"I see a guy with a wicker basket."
Those last two words give me a jolt that wakes me up better than ten cups of coffee could. Wicker basket. For the last three months Metropolis has been plagued by a serial killer. Infants wash up on the banks of the river in wicker baskets, drowned. The only thing the medical examiner can tell me of worth is that they're still alive when they go in the water. I almost threw up when I heard that. Is this guy him? Metropolis PD has a task force hunting the guy, but so far they've come up with absolutely nothing. Trying to calm my suddenly racing heartbeat, I run through the mental checklist I manage to dredge up.
"Are you plainclothes?"
"Yeah, but I've got my badge out."
"What's he doing?"
"He's walking down the street, he's heading towards the marina."
"Okay stop him. Ask him what he's doing."
What I don't say, but both of us understand, is the razor thin line we're walking. If the officer so much as pats him down without reasonable articulable suspicion (a technical legal term with decades of law developing it and ironing out edge cases) then anything that comes of the search is tainted. Inadmissible in court. Best case scenario, I manage to scramble and pull together enough other evidence to somehow, someway, still get a conviction. Worst case scenario, and far more likely, is that the public defender files a layup motion to suppress, all of my evidence gets tossed, and with it the case.
"He says he's going fishing."
"Press him!" I try to keep my voice low and professional, like my boss does when he's in court, but I can't help myself. There's the faintest edge of panic in my words. Fishing. Totally reasonable. Anyone could be out fishing. He wouldn't be the first man up early to try and get a jump on the fish.
"He just said he's going fishing again and he's started walking again."
"Ask him if you can see in the basket."
If only. If the guy gives Detective Smith consent to search the basket that's the ball game right there. Consent is the ultimate cure to the Fourth Amendment. There's no expectation of privacy in letting a cop search your bag. Anything the detective sees would be admissible evidence.
"He said no, he's almost at the end of the marina. He's only a few feet from his boat. He's going to get away, what do I do?"
"Search him."
It's a gut call. Maybe the wrong call. I'm still not sure if we have enough to search him, and almost certainly not reasonable suspicion that he's armed and dangerous to justify a Terry frisk. In my head I'm already marshaling the arguments I'm going to have to make in court to justify the search. Three in the morning is early, too early for fishing? Probably not. Wicker basket is good, wicker basket on the marina is better, but maybe there's exigent circumstances-
Over the phone I hear a loud thump, like the phone was dropped, the sounds of a scuffle, and then a shout. "GET ON THE GROUND! GET ON THE GROUND NOW!"
"Alright, well done Mr. Monkey! Not bad, not bad at all. You did almost everything right. You hit all the high notes of exceptions to the warrant requirement, and most importantly you made the call to search the basket. You didn't kill the baby."
The exercise is over. I've passed. This whole scenario has been a test. Round two of three interviews for an Assistant District Attorney position. Every fact here I was provided in a three minute summary before we launched into the exercise, or I discovered during it. My interviewer continues.
"The most important rule of what we do here at [Major City's] District Attorney's Office is Don't Kill the Baby. Anything bad happens as a result of that in the case, we'll have your back. But we do not, ever, kill the baby. You'd be surprised how many people get that wrong. It's something to do with law school. Before you go to law school, or you ask any Joe Sixpack on the street, he'll give you the same answer. Don't Kill the Baby. But you go to law school, you get so caught up in these theoretical ideas about the Fourth Amendment and privacy, and something changes. People start killing the baby. Everything else we can teach, but we need someone who will not kill the baby as a foundation to build on."
I smile and thank the interviewer as we wrap up.
It's been months since this interview, though I've recorded it here as accurately as I can recall. In that time my opinions on the Don't Kill the Baby doctrine have fluctuated time and again. Sometimes I think it's the clearest possible moral guideline. Don't Kill the Baby. How could any normal person disagree with that? Obviously you Don't Kill the Baby. What kind of monster lets the baby die? But then I think broader. Sure, Don't Kill the Baby when there's a Baby at risk. But where does this end? Does this mean Don't Kill the Baby, and it only applies when there is an actual, literal infant at risk? How often does that happen for the city to have an entire internal policy based around it? Does it really mean "fuck the Fourth Amendment" and we don't let "criminal scum" walk our streets unmolested? What about those criminal scum's rights?
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
I like freedom. I think it's pretty great. I don't think I like the idea of cops walking down the street, conducting warrantless searches without any kind of probable cause just because. But what if the cop is right. Do the ends justify the means? I don't think that officer had the right to search the wicker basket. There wasn't enough, not really. No reasonable articulable suspicion of the man being armed and dangerous to support a Terry stop and frisk, no exception to the warrant requirement at all that I can identify. Maybe, maybe exigent circumstances but that's a hard hurdle to clear. Ignoring state-level rules for the moment, exigent circumstances is poorly defined and instead is applied on a case-by-case basis which takes into account the "totality of the circumstances." Missouri v. McNeely, 569 U.S. 141, 149 (2013). Which excluding the few clearly delineated examples of exigent circumstances (hot pursuit, preventing destruction of evidence, rendering emergency assistance) in practice means "fuck it, whatever the court feels is right." But of course, the detective in the exercise did find a baby in the basket. Any judge in the country would find exigent circumstances. But of course, the court can't use the finding of the baby as logic to support exigent circumstances. That's a post hoc rationalization, and we don't do that.
I don't ask myself these questions as a matter of law, not really, despite turning them over and over in my head and trying to brute-force the law to fit the outcome. I ask them because somehow I've stumbled upon a moral quandary that I can't seem to logic my way out of. Don't Kill the Baby. But freedom is important. But exigent circumstances. But no exigent circumstances. But Don't Kill the Baby. Round-and-round I go, never with a satisfying conclusion in sight.
I didn't end up accepting this job. Not for reasons related to their Don't Kill the Baby policy, there were other factors that made taking the job unfeasible. But the exercise has lodged in my brain like a thorn under a saddle. I turn it over and over again, and never quite come to an answer I actually like. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're not supposed to have an easy answer to this problem. Maybe the fact that it confuses and annoys and exasperates me is what it should be doing. Maybe I'm so over-educated I can't recognize a simple, boring, innocuous truth when it stares me in the face. Don't Kill the Baby.
DISCLAIMER: This piece has turned into something of a lengthy retrospective focused primarily on the evolution of various laws and regulations that affect mental health care and as such, may not satisfy your particular curiosity. Feel free to skim if you'd like, where you'd like, and to ask questions about the areas and issues that are important to you. My opinions are entirely my own and my hope is that this piece will nevertheless generate more robust discussion, perhaps leading to other, more comprehensive pieces if warranted, and that you'll read it all anyway, but it will probably take a long time--you might want to get some snacks.
I.
According to Wikipedia, deinstitutionalization in the United States began in earnest in the 1950s thanks to a combination of increasing social awareness of overcrowding, poor living conditions for the mentally ill and the like, the high cost to society of incarcerating the mentally ill, and the promise of new antipsychotic medications. On a side note, one of my coworkers had been a nurse at the time the first wave of antipsychotics came into wide usage at the mental hospitals of the mid-twentieth century and she informed me that the arrival of these medicines was widely known as "when the screaming stopped" to those in the field at the time. To further the process, the Community Mental Health Act was passed in 1963 to establish grants for states to build local community health centers under the overview of the National Institute of Mental Health. It was believed at the time that it was better, when possible, for the mentally ill to both live and receive treatment in their local communities and perhaps serve as fully functional members of society. Meanwhile, landmark lawsuits were being pursued, some of them by the ACLU, that would further alter the legal landscape pertaining to mental illness, culminating in O'Connor V. Donaldson, the landmark 1975 Supreme Court ruling that held that an individual could not be incarcerated against their will unless they were in imminent danger of harming themselves or others or could not care for themselves. The decision was unanimous.
I can't help but wonder if Stewart, Burger, Marshall, Douglas, White, Brennan, Powell, and Rehnquist understood or appreciated at the time the extent to which their ruling would transform issues of mental heath and institutional mistreatment into issues of law enforcement and homelessness.
It is 1999 and I have been hired as a computer technician by my local community service center. I have no idea what my employer actually does, but the answer is that we provide access to psychiatrists, case management services for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, group therapy for substance abuse, screenings for those who might potentially require involuntary hospitalization, a parent-infant education program, two psychosocial day centers at the north and south ends of our territory, and additionally run three separate inpatient programs--one for children, one for adults, and one specifically to help patients discharged from state mental hospitals to live in a group setting and, if possible, transition to living independently. We serve several counties and one city.
My employer was founded in the early seventies and is funded mostly with Federal dollars through a combination of Community Service Block Grants, funneled through a state department specifically for the mentally ill,the developmentally disabled and those with substance use issues, Medicare and Medicaid dollars which are funneled through another state department, and (a small amount of) local tax dollars from the city and the various counties that we serve. Moreover, the Mental Health Parity Act has recently been signed into law, requiring insurance to cover mental health treatment at the same level of funding that the cover physical health treatment. Other localities differ in their services offered by virtue of receiving more/better local funding for their particular community service center. Our funding, by comparison, has always been lacking.
I don't know this at the time but despite our poor level of funding, these are the salad days four our mental health center and I have arrived just in time to witness them. Our various clinics seem to be run well and we provide a variety of services to our area, though they tend to be on the basic side aside from those that are funded by specific grants. Deinstitutionalization is still a big Thing and our state run mental hospitals are still working to discharge folks that are deemed to be no danger to themselves.
Of course, all is not sunshine and roses. Water cooler gossip is an easy vice and can range from the mostly harmless amusement at a particular client's peccadilloes (such as the client with the delusion that Jesus was a member of Kool and the Gang) to more busybody-like criticism and denigration. We have staff that get too directive, too aggressive, and too involved in the lives of their clients. HIPAA security rules are (presumably) still being written and argued over and for all practical purposes our client records are protected solely by the honor system with no checks and balances in place to protect client confidentiality. Most of the staff I interact with, however, are pleasant kindhearted, and earnest in their performance of their jobs.
Everything seems to be running smoothly at first. So smoothly, in fact, that the executive director resigns because he feels he has nothing major left to do or build. Soon afterwards, the dot com bubble pops and the economy tanks. In reaction, our funding is cut severely and even taken back in the midst of the current fiscal year. Salaries are frozen and layoffs are imminent. Funding and grants for many programs dry up, forcing us to close them. Throughout my tenure here, this pattern will cyclically repeat itself.
II.
It almost goes without saying that there is plenty of controversy surrounding pyschiatry specifically and the concepts of mental health and mental illness in general. One of these is the use of the medical model of mental illness, which is essentially the belief that mental illness and mental disorders are rooted in biological issues. The overwhelming success of the first wave of antipsychotics and the clear successes of the second wave of antidepressants has greatly bolstered this model of treatment. Accordingly, we are tasked with reporting many things that focus on behavioral and social issues by the department that controls the block grant funding, while also reporting the required medically focused data to the department of Medicare and Medicaid as we bill for our services. In fact, we are considered healthcare providers from a legal perspective and are bound by all relevant laws and regulations pertaining to the healthcare industry.
It is 2003 and I have been promoted from computer technician to MIS (Medical Information Systems) Specialist and we have hired another person into my old position. In the wake of the earlier fiscal shock, our new Executive Director is emphasizing running our service organization more like a business. Things are changing! Even now it is obvious that we will need more in the near future; HIPAA has mandated the move to EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) code sets and rules, which are a twisty maze of specifications and regulations which I would encourage you to peek at in the link just to get a feel for the complexity--the relevant parts are under the "transactions and code sets rule" in Title II. Fortunately for us, our medical practice based software, a sturdy old RPG based platform running on Unix, has been bought by $Big_Online_Company and is a planned centerpiece of their entry into the new world of EDIs and Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Implementing this will be a huge task and will involve things like deploying a wireless network, a fleet of powerful SCSI-based scanners to convert paper records into electronic records, almost tripling our PC inventory as each clinician will now be using Word to write electronic notes, etc.
On the clinical side, we are recovering from the rescinded funds of the dot com bust. Our only remaining residential program is the long-term inpatient group home for those discharged from state mental hospitals, though that is still going strong. Deinstitutionalization in general is about to wind down as the state reaches its target bed numbers but is still a Thing for the moment, and discharge assistance funds are still available. Some good people have left, and in some cases have been replaced by some not-as-good people and the clinics in question have suffered as support for clients and clinical staff has worsened. Time passes.
It is 2005 and my boss is making a presentation on the triumphs and challenges of implementing an EMR at a statewide conference on the bright new future of healthcare technology. Our experience has been a mixed bag at best, to put it kindly, and has taught us many lessons. Staff had a high level of uncertainty about using an entirely electronic system and likewise, a high level of resistance to changing the way they work. Some clinicians have been able to adopt to using PCs to do their work while others can not or will not adapt well to using a PC. Some staff quit outright, while others in the latter category remain and generally become a burden to support staff in general and our department specifically. Converting existing paper records to scanned records is an ongoing and tedious process, and has the benefit of being accessible by anyone but also can be harder to read, especially when the material is handwritten. Mistakes are still made in the electronic record but can sometimes be harder to correct due to the stringency of some rules and regulations surrounding the editing of data and notes. It is, however, easier for mistakes to be caught by reviews and compliance given the increased accessibility to all charts. It is also easier for staff to violate the privacy of clients by viewing client data that they shouldn't be viewing and in our particular case would require strong oversight and enforcement from compliance with the backing of upper management in order for us to maintain reasonable safeguards. Ultimately, it has made some things easier and some things harder, but overall it has definitely created a heavier burden for our entire organization, by at least an order of magnitude, than the old paper system that preceded it.
Aside from our presentation, however, most of the conference is abuzz about the positive impact that technology can and will have on healthcare in the future. Health Information Exchanges (HIE) will soon allow us to exchange client information with each other through the magic of a standardized data format, HL7! Federal funding will assist us with building and accessing this bright new future for healthcare! Other presentations from statewide efforts to share data with medicaid departments in other states are more positive than our own experience! Speaking of data, a statewide initiative to consolidate and standardize disparate data requests and requirements into a single, unified set of sixty to eighty-odd data elements is underway. The paper surveys that I initially collated as a bored junior staff member have mushroomed, often into Excel spreadsheets, and have become burdensome and difficult to complete in a timely fashion and it is hoped that a common data set will satisfy future requirements and alleviate some of the survey burden.
Moloch has entered the chat.
III.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, aka the Stimulus) has been passed. Because EMRs have been found to be costly, inefficient, and relatively user-unfriendly, the Health Information Technology for Clinical Heath Act (HITECH), enacted under Title XIII of the ARRA, provides funding for the healthcare industry at large to adopt systems that provide adoption of an Electronic Health Record (EHR-if you're wondering what the difference is between an EMR and an EHR, you're not alone). Additionally, it provides additional funds over the course of several years if doctors can meet the standard of Meaningful Use. Conversely, adopters of an EHR whose doctors do not demonstrate meaningful use will be docked a small but increasing amount of Medicare funds.
It is 2010 and I am attending another data conference. My boss has sent me here specifically to attend a presentation from another service center on the triumphs and challenges of moving on from their ancient database and implementing a modern EHR-based system. It turns out that staff had a high level of uncertainty about using an entirely electronic system and likewise, a high level of resistance to changing the way they worked. Some clinicians were able to adopt to using PCs to do their work while others could not or would not adapt well to using a PC. Some staff quit outright, while others in the latter category remained and generally became a burden to support staff in general and our department specifically. The presenter and implementation lead suffered a heart attack in the course of the implementation, in no small part due to his overall stress levels as project lead. Ultimately, it has made some things easier and some things harder, but overall it has definitely created a heavier burden for their entire organization, by at least and order of magnitude, as opposed to the old paper system that preceded it. It is all familiar to me and I strongly suspect that I was sent at least partly to gloat commiserate about the common difficulties of modernizing.
Despite being further down this path ourselves, dealing with our administrative burden is beginning to be a struggle. Medicaid regulations have begun to inexorably creep into our documentation requirements and to make matters worse, are often overlapping given the variety of services that we provide, contributing to staff confusion and clerical errors. The initial sixty-odd data elements that were standardized are growing quickly and are poorly understood by staff, and I am tasked with tidying up the data that we send on a monthly basis to minimize rejections. I frequently and shockingly encounter pushback from even supervisory level staff on things like the proper Axis for a diagnosis, how to classify drug diagnoses, and the difference in terms of art like Serious Emotional Disturbance and Serious Mental Illness, which in point of fact is a strictly age-based distinction. At this point, it is crystal clear to me that the majority of behavioral staff are terrible with concrete definitions and categories and that they are generally a poor fit for such precise data gathering. Worse still, the standard data set has not seemed to stem the tide of surveys that we are required to answer, often with short turnaround times, and in point of fact, said surveys often request data that we don't necessarily collect at all.
Client care suffers as staff are spending ever-increasing amounts of time doing documentation to meet the increased regulatory burdens. Despite trying to run our centers as a business, our funding has remained relatively stagnant. The populations of our counties and city, on the other hand, have continued to grow, also increasing our workload. Two of the counties we serve now qualify as suburbs! Another program has closed and worse still, an unhealthy us vs. them mentality has become pervasive throughout our organization. Staff are largely ignorant of the state and federal level legal and regulatory requirements that have led to the current administrative and staff burden, seeing this instead as the fault of our administrators. Lines have been drawn, leadership has clashed, and the losers either resign outright or engage in quiet quitting, pushing their unofficial support burdens to surrounding staff. Unofficial support itself is a huge burden as new staff are regularly hired with little or no technical skills and thus have to learn how to use Windows and Word and how to navigate our particular system on the fly, and most of this burden falls to the clerical staff that have used it since my time here, and the three of us in IT/MIS. We are accruing technical debt at an alarming pace. Things are strained to say the least.
The cherry on top of this unfortunate situation is that our medical practice system has ceased being developed. $Big_Online_Company, perhaps recognizing the size of the field they were playing on, divested themselves of our software and sold it to a $Solid_established_software_company that while good at supporting the existing codebase, has made minimal to no effort to fix bugs, release updates that address glitches and incompatibilities, and otherwise keep the software current, frequently requiring us to implement workarounds and/or stay on older versions of software in order to keep things running. And while $Big_Online_Company did develop a newer, more modern front end for their system, it's still the same old RPG-based code on the back end with all of its inherent limitations, and although it would technically meet the HITECH requirements, it would be an obvious disaster for us to implement absent a large and customized set of code designed just for us.
IV.
In August 2008, HHS proposed moving from ICD-9 diagnosis codes, which are used for billing purposes, to more modern ICD-10-CM codes. The new ICD codes were originally to be put in place by October 2013, then delayed to October 2014, and finally to October 2015. On the clinical side, the DSM-5 is released in 2015, which is an update to the DSM-IV-TR and changes many things and thus is an ongoing source of controversy.
It is 2013 and we have gone through a grueling Request For Proposal (RFP) process to replace our now long in the tooth medical practice system. Our three choices are the aforementioned update to our existing medical practice software based on ancient and hoary RPG, an old and crusty behavioral based system based on old, outdated, and niche Delphi, of all things, and a comparatively modern, web based behavioral system running on .asp and SQL and increasingly being adopted by other service centers around the state. The choice is an obvious one and we are now implementing the web based behavioral system. Staff have a high level of uncertainty about using a new web-based system and likewise, a high level of resistance to changing the way they work. Some workflows require significant change while others will be eliminated entirely. Some staff will quit outright, while others will remain, digging in their heels, and generally become a burden to support staff in general and our department specifically. Overall, however, the new system is more forgiving of mistakes and much more user-friendly than the previous and ultimately, it will make many things easier and only a few things harder. It will, unfortunately, require a much higher level of coordination between the various programs and clinical centers and administrative and MIS/IT staff in order to run smoothly. But wait! There's more! We have decided to demonstrate Meaningful Use with our new EHR, which is a twisty maze of specifications and medical codes that I would encourage you to peek at in the link just to get a feel for the complexity of meeting its requirements. Because I have become the de facto owner of our electronic forms, I am tasked with working with C-level staff in order to develop the required workflows and insert the required documentation into the required places.
Administrative burden continues to increase, as does our technical debt. Our CEO has resigned and a new CEO is incoming, with a desire to place more emphasis on expanding the services that we provide to the community through increased commitments from the various localities and grants and other forms of federal and state funding for various services. Things are changing! Worse still, our state has decided to outsource Medicaid billing to a private insurance company, a move which also will significantly increase our administrative burden. Our once manageable data set that we regularly report is pushing 100 individual client data elements, and in fact we are now reporting ever-more data to ever-more acronyms relevant to various state and federal initiatives in ever-more ways--there are 16 more initiatives requiring their own data, in fact, as counted by our statewide data committee.
Implementation progresses. There are many pain points, most of which are technical in nature and difficult for clinical staff to understand. In our new system. There is much concern for minimizing staff disruptions and minimizing change to workflow wherever possible. As a result, many potential gains are left unrealized. Despite all of this, and due in large part to extended hours worked by the staff involved in implementation, our roll-out is fairly smooth, and most of our major issues are ironed out within the first two days of going live.
Unfortunately, client care still suffers as staff are still spending ever-increasing amounts of time on documentation to meet the increased regulatory burdens. Substance use services are a vestigial remnant of their former selves, and we have dwindled to one staff member responsible for the whole of them, which mostly involves with facilitating inpatient treatment for clients. Worse still, our developmental disability data is lacking as a state, and we have been found negligent in discharge of our duties, resulting in a meticulous and vastly increased amount of paperwork and data reporting, some of which has been helpfully added in by the department of developmental disability itself in a prime example of friendly fire via lawsuit. This is further exacerbated when the developmental disability department funds a state website to authorize treatment for the developmentally disabled and to enter client treatment plans electronically, potentially leading to double entry as all state entities serving the developmentally disabled must send this data to the department. Additionally, the department signs a contract with a leading IT vendor to develop interoperability between their brand new website and the existing EHR systems that various state centers and agencies are using. The specifications are agreed upon, the contract is finalized, and the department promptly violates the contract and invokes financial penalties two weeks later when they change the data specifications. This will not be the last time that this happens before the interoperability project is completed. Time passes.
It is 2016 and my boss and I are attending a workshop about Government Reporting Modernization Act (GPRA) reporting that we must do as a part of our award of State Opioid Recovery (SOR) funding. It is entirely how-to and a complete waste of our time, and also exemplary of the growing expectation that we will administer anything and everything related to clinical functions. GPRAs have several flavors the flavor we use is detailed and invasive in its questions, as it involves substance use and sexual habits. As part of our SOR grant for Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid use, we are expected to administer the GPRA to all incoming clients that are receiving MAT and to follow up with them periodically for two years after termination of services if possible. We bail on the second half of the presentation.
We are beginning to drown in a sea of unintelligible data, administrative burden and technical debt. It is so unintelligible, in fact, that even at the state level they are consulting with their foremost auditor, who had retired, to help them understand their own data requirements. Documentation is now for all intents and purposes a full-time job in and of itself and, just like their pure healthcare based counterparts, staff are compensating either by skimping on their documentation or by working unreported overtime. Developmental disability continues to be a rolling train wreck of continuous updates to data and documentation requirements and non-functioning interoperability between their website and the various EHRs; most service centers including our own have abandoned all attempts to use their own EHRs to document the individual service plans and use the state website exclusively and then simply attaching a copy of that documentation to a service or record in their respective EHR platforms.
Worse still, our state has decided that outsourcing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to private insurance has gone so well that they bring in over a dozen new insurance companies! Ostensibly, they all agree to common requirements but in practice this is not so true, leading to large billing and documentation headaches on the back end. Registration and admission forms are frequently changed, requiring increasing amounts of time both to update and understand. I am darkly amused when I find that different insurers are categorizing race and ethnicity, a data point that has mushroomed in the last decade or so, differently than the agreed-upon state standard as well as differently than each other. But wait! There's more! We are now required to do service specific provider intakes, meaning that if a client is enrolled in multiple services, each service must have its own intake and each intake is supposed to be performed by a Licensed Mental Health Professional (LMHP) type, which requires a graduate degree, significant amounts of time as a supervised resident providing services, and the passing of a test. This is a large and unwelcome change as we already have significant issues with hiring and keeping licensed professionals and even residents, as they largely leave for greener and easier to navigate pastures as soon as possible.
V.
The Excellence in Mental Health Act, a part of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act, was passed in 2014 and established a new model for treating mental health and substance use disorders within the community regardless of a client's ability to pay-the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC). The intention is to quickly provide clients with access to services regardless of their status and ability to pay.
It is 2018 and our state has passed legislation to implement the CCBHC model within the existing framework of our legislation and regulation. We're going to provide clients with same day access to intake and services! There won't be any more waiting lists! We're going to skip all the paperwork and use a standard assessment tool (which we must pay a fee to license each provider to use, natch) to assess a client's daily level of functioning. Why, there's all kinds of redundancy in data gathering and paperwork, don't you know? (Shut. Up!) We're going to eliminate all of that and just focus on getting clients in the door and into services! Staff can and should document their encounters collaboratively with clients! Better still, we can use more lightly credentialed peers to provide services instead of more expensive licensed staff!
The consultants responsible for the assessment have frequent calls with us to aid in implementing the required changes. They go on and on in our about how this is so great and how it's going to streamline everything. Pointed questions about existing regulations and laws that stand counter to the streamlining that is being evangelized by the consultants are are routinely brushed off with the refrain of, "well, the state of $State moves at the speed of the state of $State." They are also big on double-checking the law and regulations and like to tell stories about other centers and agencies that have been misled about what they should be doing to their detriment. While they are Not Wrong about this and many other things, the practical reality of the situation is that just as the law is whatever the judge says it is, the regulations and requirements are exactly what the auditors and Licensure say they are, and as we are highly unlikely to resort to litigation in order to resolve our differences, snitches getting stitches and all that, we will ultimately experience minimal gains from this.
As the Forms Guy, I am tasked with filling out a spreadsheet with every single form question in our EHR and identifying each of our forms in which it appears with the goal of deduplicating All of the Things. This turns out to be just shy of 4,000 unique questions, some of which are duplicated dozens of times, usually in free text fields like "notes" or "session details" that cannot be deduplicated. Worse still, many of the forms in question are State built forms and thus cannot practically be altered by those of us that are merely using them to report back to the state and so those data elements cannot be deduplicated either. I already ruthlessly cut redundancy and duplicity where I could; the low hanging fruit has been plucked and despite their insistence to the contrary, the reduction in duplicate effort and redundancy will be minimal at best. Of course, we do discover that absent consistent supervision and training on our existing workflows, staff and supervisors have developed their own procedures and documentation which needs to be brought into line, so the exercise as a whole does produce some positive results, it's just that ideally we'd be doing this ourselves anyway.
But wait! There's more! Medicaid requirements for clients have continued to evolve. Client intakes are no longer required to be service specific but are now expected to be a more comprehensive assessment of client needs. There is a hope among C-levels and supervisory staff that through the magic of Same Day Access (SDA) and the ability of clients to fill out their own forms in the client portal, clients will somehow provide the bulk of the necessary information themselves by filling out these forms! Given that many clients rely on our staff to help them navigate bureaucracy in the first place, and further that most of our staff do not understand the data they're supposed to be gathering from the clients I am beyond unimpressed with the shortsightedness of our collective management. Worse still, I am tasked with developing the client forms that will be created by a committee consisting of all program supervisors. When all is said and done, I have been given almost 100 questions that amount to a wish list of wants from each program. The majority of them are absurd, most especially the substance exposed infant questions that asks technical questions about the development of the baby. The darker, cynical cockles of my heart are thoroughly tickled by the whole affair and amongst those that I think can understand, I point to this episode as a prime example of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I break down the questions into six separate client forms that clients will allegedly be filling out themselves while waiting to be seen. As. If.
This is not to say that the idea of same day access and getting clients into treatment as quickly as possible is flawed--far from it, in fact! And there are other good ideas in there as well! They have recommendations for dealing with chronic no-show clients, an issue endemic in our field and exacerbated by Medicaid regulations that disallow fees for clients that fail to show up. Neither do I disagree with the notion that engaging clients quickly and frequently leads to better outcomes than our current system of engaging them on at least a monthly basis. It is clear that more engagement is beneficial to clients on the whole! In the balance, however, this new model of providing services is not without its own issues and problems. Lower functioning clients, for example, tend to need dedicated case management just to be able to navigate their lives. And most tellingly, this new model requires complete commitment to its principle in order to have any reasonable chance of working well. And our state, as is its wont, is trying to graft it onto the existing structure and bureaucracies.
In other words, "Good luck, have fun!"
Apart from this fresh new hell, we are actively drowning in a sea of unintelligible data, administrative burden and technical debt. State level dashboards have become a Thing in and of themselves and are driving new and burdensome questions that are too technical for anyone outside of the MIS/IT department to understand with some exceptions for the COO and the CPO (Chief Program Officer). The three of us in said MIS/IT department are overwhelmed by our combination of help desk, clinical, MIS, and IT specific duties; it is hard to pay attention to server patching and security when also doing end-user support, EHR administration, and data analysis as required and none of us have the bandwidth to completely grok the entirety of the responsibilities of the others in our department. Developmental disability continues to be a rolling train wreck of continuous updates to data and documentation requirements and non-functioning interoperability between their website and the various EHRs. Our substance use program is growing with zero concerns about compliance or oversight for all intents and purposes. Medically assisted treatment has become Office Based Opioid Treatment (OBOT) and is flush with continued grant funding and consistent with this growth is widespread confusion amongst substance-use focused staff about how we report the services we're offering, particularly the difference between outpatient therapy, which is individual, and intensive outpatient therapy, which is group-based.
Time passes and with much effort and funding, Same Day Access manages to get off the ground. While we have managed to standardize our intake procedure, surprise, the clients are not in fact doing their own intakes when all is said and done. By virtue of serving disparate masters our new intake process is much more complicated and burdensome than the system that preceded However, we have several staff and a dedicated supervisor handling same day access at one clinic location and on a good day, each staff member can process several intakes each, netting perhaps a dozen intakes a day.
VI.
"Apres moi, le deluge." -Louis XV
It is 2021 and my boss and I are meeting with the supervisory staff of all programs and applicable C-levels to go over the data reporting requirements to which we are beholden. My boss, myself, and the special projects manager are the only ones in the agency left understanding how Same Day Access and its data gathering is supposed to work. It's on all the hot state dashboards and we are getting dinged for it regularly. Worse still, the data collection requirements have mushroomed, and we have gone from relatively straightforward things such as the date of first offered appointment after the same day access appointment to a twisty maze of collecting height, weight, and BMI, performing suicidality assessments on clients with diagnosis of depression and veterans, referring clients out for metabolic syndrome screening if they take psychotropic meds (and most of them either do or will) and reporting the results back to the state, performing primary care screenings, and the list goes on. We desperately want to convey this knowledge to the attendees, especially the complicated coordination that these workflows require in order for the data in question to even be reported at all, but most are busy texting on their phones, reading their emails, doing other work, and otherwise ignoring us. This is bad because not only are we drowning in a sea of unintelligible data and administrative burden, but there has been an exodus in upper management and the present staff are all that's left to pick up the pieces of responsibility that, at least on paper, was theirs all along.
The bill for serious amounts technical debt is now due and sending said debt to /dev/null is Bad Idea Jeans, which is of course exactly what we're doing. Every summer since the inception of the reporting of these outcomes I have multiple meetings where our system and documentation is blamed for our poor performance on the state dashboards. Every summer I explain that the outcomes in question are multi-step and require co-ordination between the staff filling out the forms and the staff doing the diagnosing in order for said outcomes to even be reported to the state. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you're picturing an old-school flip clock changing its time display from 5:59 to 6:00 and I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher playing on a radio, then you're picking up what I'm putting down.
AT this point, the level of client care we are giving varies based on which particular department is handling the client's needs. We have a spiffy new drug court program that is leveraging our OBOT program and clients in the counties where we have staff in place can enter pretty quickly. In other counties, not so much, but we'll get there. DD clients have their traditional barriers to access and crushing paperwork requirements, which is to say they generally wait years for any sort of significant aid. Traditional mental health client service is, in places, practically non-existent thanks to a nasty combination of COVID policies, which include dragooning case managers into managing telehealth appointments for the doctors and clients one day each week, the Great Resignation, and neglect on our part. Absent strong understanding and supervision, Same Day Access has dwindled and only several folks are able to be seen in an average day. A therapist I know had previously been a case manager a year ago and several of her clients still call her in an attempt to get services, stating that their case managers don't call them back and neither do their supervisors. Said therapist patiently explains that she can no longer even access their charts because HIPAA. She is working with a different population now and simply directs her former clients to file a human rights complaint with the State. This is not the only area where she is de facto performing the job duties for other staff, nor is she the only one I hear this from; my overall impression is that outside of the drug court services, traditional DD services, and access to psychiatrists, we don't seem to be doing much of anything for our clients these days.
It is 2022 and my boss has resigned. My interest in replacing him was tepid at its best and so the friend of $New_COO is brought in to manage IT. Thankfully, I really like $New_Boss as well, because I learn the hard way that I am too burned out to even get serious about finding another IT admin job. Even more thankfully, we've finally expanded the IT department to include a dedicated help desk position and another IT specialist and both are excellent--we might actually be able to leverage the more modern parts of our architecture to streamline some old processes! The CEO is retiring (for good!), however, at the end of the year and worse still, we are having serious problems recruiting and retaining staff for all of the reasons you'd expect, including the increased strain of the ever-evolving COVID lockdowns. We are still actively drowning in a sea of unintelligible data and administrative burden and our technical debt is still compounding at an alarming rate. Outside of the growth of OBOT and the drug courts, our client care is still at a low point. In true Orwellian fashion, potential clients are now showing up early in the morning, well before we open, in an attempt to be assessed through Same Day Access and actually get themselves into services. Worse still, the state has launched a new initiative to Unify All The Things and expects us to do their work for them participate in its implementation as the head of the project is not familiar with our existing bureaucracy. This, of course, bogs down quickly due to those pesky laws and regulations that command us to report things via specific processes and in specific formats that cannot be magically done away with. Time passes.
It is 2024 and I am attending yet another meeting pertaining to yet another attempt at Unifying All The Things. The first attempt, predictably, was retired quietly, but this time the state has hired The Pros From Dover and is implementing a data warehouse that is expected to be its source of truth moving forward. The ~120 data elements that we are currently reporting on a monthly basis, as well as a significant number other points of additional points of data from the TEDS dataset, are initially expected to be sent directly to the state on a real-time basis thanks to the magic of HL7. The timeline for implementation is about 18 months.
This time, they mean business.
We are still actively drowning in a sea of unintelligible data and administrative burden and our technical debt continues to compound despite the glaringly-obvious need in the approaching data warehouse implementation mentioned above. Worse still, the eye of Sauron is now upon us; the metrics on one of our dashboards is bad enough that we are on a PIP and will be expected to raise our performance in that metric in particular as well our metrics in general. But wait! There's more! The state is once again consulting with their foremost auditor, who had re-retired, to help them better understand their own data requirements. In addition to the increased burdens of making the sausage tidying our data on a daily instead of a monthly basis, it is reasonable for us to expect to be nit-picked on our inaccuracies and our failures as well!
Drug court and Office Based Addiction Treatment (Office Based Opioid Treatment, being so 2000-late, apparently) continues to chug along. DD clients have their traditional barriers to access and crushing paperwork requirements. Traditional mental health client service is, in places, almost nonexistent, but better than it was. In true Orwellian fashion, potential clients are still showing up early in the morning, well before we open, in an attempt to be assessed through Same Day Access and actually get themselves into services. On the bright side, COVID is officially over and at least our offices are open again, giving clients greater access to staff and better still, $New_New_CEO, in addition to wanting to run our organization more like a business (things are changing!), has implemented a "next business day" policy for returning phone calls and emails to further promote greater access to staff.
Why $New_New_CEO? Well that's a fun story in itself, but the essence is that $New_CEO turned out to be a disaster and a major disruptive force in her short-lived tenure, a powerful and terrible example of the Peter Principle. The bad news is that many senior figures have left for greener pastures during her tenure and though $New_new_CEO is much better (see above) the damage had been done and another large portion of our institutional knowledge is gone. Even scarier, amongst the new batch of senior figures in terms of institutional knowledge is... me. Like the previous senior figures, I am also still performing several jobs (the most concerning of which is the Maker of the Sausage Knower of the Data Specifications) and I, too, am burned out, tired of not being able to actually escape work, and frustrated with the constant stream of new and existing employees that are ignorant about the realities of our work (often deliberately so). And when $New_Management frequently bombards me with questions such as, "where is the workflow," and, "was this communicated," I want to scream at them that as a meager specialist, I have never been management, I have frequently pointed to where our existing documentation lies and have frequently communicated change in the past, and I have never had any actual authority to decide or enact any of this myself at all. And then follow that up with throwing a bunch of things and ragequitting.
$New_Boss recently said to me, "you know, when I first got here I thought there was no way it could be this bad and that you were just being a cynical asshole. Now I see that you were really just telling me the truth."
VII.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. -Reverend William Anderson Scott
The sixties, for all intents and purposes, were a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The issue of mental health services is and always has been a quintessential wicked problem that we can really only try to improve at each iteration. As effective as the first and second wave drugs were in helping to treat mental illness, they have not lived up to the hopes that we had for them. Nor has deinstitutionalization led to universally better outcomes for clients and in fact, although I find the legal principle of O'Connor to be wonderful in theory, I believe that in practice and in the balance, it has been a cruelty to the more mentally ill among us. However, that's not to say that our outcomes are universally terrible. For all of their limitations, side effects, and potentially inflated prices, drugs are absolutely, positively the best bang for the buck treatment of mental illness at the community and society level. They provide relief from pervasive states of consciousness and a stability that clients simply cannot achieve without them. Unfortunately, I believe any greater outcome for any given individual would require that magical "willingness to change" that is, all too often, limited to nonexistent. Throw in a metric fuckton of data requirements that expect dust-speck fine levels of specificity and the whole rest of the medical bureaucracy with its various and sundry deep-reaching regulations and requirements, add in a staff that by and large doesn't have the technical chops to readily comprehend the difference between an assessment instrument and a diagnosis, and you've got a recipe for atrocious records and data that add up to little better than unreliable noise. Which means that practically speaking, a lot of this work is, to paraphrase the old Soviet joke, "we pretend to help and they pretend to be helped," with the real punchline being that on the national level, all of our data gathering is the garbage in, and the policies that result from that are the garbage out.
I just found this place and it almost feels like an internet version of a toastmasters club which is kinda fun. I have a rather unexciting job that gives me hours to fill in the day so I figured I will spend the end of my shift here talking about a thing I am passionate about, and if I don't get chased out with Pitchforks maybe I'll do it again sometime. I did not grow up in an Outdoorsy household my Dad used to say he did enough sleeping outside in the Army before I was born so I suppose it is a little odd that from a young age I have always had an interest and passion for all things outdoors. Hunting, Fishing, Shooting, and camping are all things that I love. I am not particularly sure where it came from maybe I watched Jeremiah Johnson at too young of an age I am unsure.
Anyways the one I do know specifically for a fact where I learned it from is my passion for Antique firearms, as a teenager I was very active in the Boy Scouts and worked on the Rifle Range teaching merit badges every summer. The man who ran the range was a hobbyist with muzzle loaders and had a few Hawken rifles he built from kits. The thunderous whoosh and smoke a 50 cal Hawken makes was mesmerizing from the first time I saw it. He also cast his own bullets for it a concept I had never even thought was possible at 14 it amazed me that someone could make something like that themselves without the help of anyone else. He taught me everything one needed to get started, how to load, how to shoot, how to cast bullets, I was hooked then and there. A few years later I was able to pick up a 1861 Springfield rifle like those issued in the Civil War.
What I think the really satisfying part of shooting old firearms is that you really sort of are on your own. Yes there are a few places that may sell Burton Balls or Paper Cartridges still you will absolutely pay through the nose for them so if you are to shoot anything more than once a year on your birthday you better learn quickly how to do it yourself. I think it really forces you to get a better understanding for how efficient our modern world really is too, if I want to load and shoot 40 rounds in my musket it will take me the majority of a afternoon between melting lead, cutting paper, melting beeswax, and rolling them up to get them set. If you want to shoot your AR-15 you can grab two 20 round boxes and be on your way. Another thing about them is they will humble you and they will do it quickly it's about the only thing about an old muzzle-loader that is fast sure you might be able to stack rounds all day with a .270 at 150 yards but try it with a old caplock. I think this is fun because it forces you to really slow down and learn to become a better shooter there really is nothing like it I would say. Shooting them really does feel like bringing something back from the dead in a way. There was a time when the best of the best could muster 3 shots a minute on a man size target it almost seems like a tall tale anymore like Paul Bunyan but once upon a time it meant you were one of the deadliest in the world.
I regularly shoot matches with some of these old warhorses it normally does not lead to many laps in victory lane as I am simply outgunned but there is nothing more fun than taking a rifle last issued when Garfield was president out to the range, and who knows you might even have the occasional upset. I suppose I will close in saying that if you find yourself bored this weekend try and get out there and make some smoke I bet you'll like it.
The Psychiatrist Goes To a Pub
Serendipity is a grossly underrated factor in life. I've been in Small Scottish Town for about 6 months now, and trawled the local bars about as many times.
Said Small Scottish Town has had a trajectory roughly representative of the whole. All the kids fled for the Big City at the first opportunity, the High Street had seen better days if not better highs. It was kept running mostly by pensioners, and middle-aged couples returning to their roots now that they wanted kids away from the hustle and bustle of urban life. It had about a ratio of 1:2000 bars per capita, down from a ratio of closer to 1:400 that was its absolute peak before Covid culled the herd. It was pure survival of the fittest, 27 bars brought down to four, or enough of the pensioners retired from drink by virtue of death. You can't buy a new set of clothes, but you sure can get still get drunk there. This is a story of how I did.
I've been a good little boy for the duration of my stay in Scotland, and very rarely has the desire to haunt the local watering holes overtaken me. I had a shitty day at work, and the weekend beckoned, so I decided to stop by and have a drink. Perhaps two or three, as the mood took me.
I wandered up to a new pub, notable only in that a pint of Tenet's was half a pound cheaper than the last one I visited. As I approached the doors, I was greeted by a gaggle of regulars who had clearly popped out for a smoke. Notable among them were a lady who was well past inebriated and into loud drunk territory, and a bald and well-built gentleman, who if slightly past peak bouncer age, wasn't at the point it was unbelievable.
There I came, lugging a backpack full of random junk, NHS ID card flapping in the wind. I was just about to walk through the doors, when the lady accosted me and demanded that I show her my ID before I could enter.
This was eyebrow raising to say the least, the last time I was carded was back when I was 16, but I'm nothing if not long-suffering. I was just about to produce my government issued residency permit, a fancy piece of plastic that proclaimed with holographic probity that I was an alien with temporary reprieve in the nation, when she guffawed, embraced me in a bear hug, and explained that she was having me on. I laughed, and said that it's been a good while since I was asked to show ID, my haircut must have done wonders.
Piss-takes are nothing unusual to me, and this town is isolated enough that it's avoided the transition of Britain into a Multicultural Nation, exotic would just about cover the handful of Polish expats and the odd Ukrainian refugee dwelling there. My color and complexion would scream not from around these parts regardless of whatever I said, and I didn't particularly care either way. I'm just here to do my job, and potentially have a stiff drink when it's done.
I went through, relishing the temporary warmth and refuge from the chill. A pint of Tennent's please, to keep me warm and comfy in a country where the sun had just about deigned to stay visible in the sky when the clock struck five.
I'd gotten halfway through my sorely needed drink when the lady who had had a laugh at my expense came in, and took her seat at the counter. She apologized for having me on, and when it was clear I'd handled it with good humor, began grilling me about who I was and what I was up to.
I was happy enough about answering her endless queries. I'd been there for about 6 months and change. I was working in the psychiatric department of the hospital twenty minutes away, and was just about finished with that placement. She expressed surprise at the knowledge I was a doctor, but was interrupted by a friend of hers, another middle-aged lady with as many piercings and tattoos as she had years on me.
It turned out that they all had the same bug-bear, namely the lack of doctors in the area. To translate further, a lack of GPs, the steadfast and underpaid bedrock on which the NHS stands. I commiserated with her, mentioning that I could certainly empathize with her, even with collegial congeniality and pulled strings, I had faced months long wait-times for my own medical concerns, and was aware that years was the norm when it came for waiting times for things that wouldn't kill you outright.
Some more explanation followed, as I explained that no, doctors are allowed to sneak away for a drink at the end of the week, especially as I wasn't on the on-call rota for this weekend.
This was met with hearty cheers, as an eminently sensible decision. I downed my first pint in pleasant company. I would have been content to watch the game show on the telly and nurse my drink, but the lady at the door decided to strike up further conversation. I had nothing better to do, with only time spent grinding textbooks waiting for me back at home.
Eventually, the conversation took unexpected turns. Tattoo Lady revealed that she was a born-again Christian, and expounded on her conviction that there was demonic influence running in the background, which compounded existing trauma and was a likely explanation for why several of her friends had been the victims of sexual violence. Not just once, but multiple times.
This was a heavy subject, to say the least. I wisely opted for not challenging her beliefs in favor of a quick treatise on Internal Family Systems, a psychological framework for explaining mental illness that I, quite truthfully, explained believed in literal demons, unacknowleged trauma and personality shards (for a more prosaic explanation) being culpable. She helpfully drew up a PDF of an ebook she'd been planning to read on the topic, and even more helpfully, explained that she hadn't read it yet, except for the cover blurb.
At this point, Bouncer Lady wanted to know more about me and what I was up to, I explained that I was a psychiatry trainee at the hospital further down the road. She began talking about her son, a Nurse Practitioner down in London, and how overworked the poor guy was, having to hold two bleeps at night. I commiserated, and said I hoped he was holding up well. She opened his Facebook profile, and showed a picture of him to me. I quite truthfully said he was a handsome guy, and that he took after his mum in that regard.
With the bottom of her glass now visible, she went on to confide in me that he was gay. I didn't visibly react, beyond an oh, but did go on to ask if that had been difficult for him, given he'd grown up in Small Town.
She said it had, though she and her family had been nothing but supportive. He'd been bullied quite badly in school, but had pulled through and was doing much better since he went to uni. She went on to complain that he no longer told her about the men he was seeing, especially since a solicitor boyfriend had rung her up when they'd broken up, and had threatened to commit suicide if he didn't come back to him. Then came an anaesthesist, who had sounded lovely, but had worried the lady sick when she fretted about him dosing her darling boy with all kinds of knockout drugs.
I really ought not to have brought up a recent news story about an anaesthesist who had gotten into deep shit after being caught pilfering sedatives from his hospital, for the purposes of getting it on with his girlfriend.
I did however, have the sense not to divulge what I knew enough of the gay lifestyle down south, especially the fact that party poppers and all kinds of other illicit substances were commonplace. I told her that I hadn't actually met any gay doctors since coming here, but she grumbled that it seemed to her that half of them batted for the other team, at least according to her son.
She told me about the flat he had gotten a killer deal on, in London, and asked me where I was staying in town. I told her that I was renting, and that I lived with X and Y, a couple, expecting them to be recognized since the town was small enough that everyone knew everyone else.
Her face shriveled up like a prune, like she'd bitten a lemon. "They're bad people! You need to move away!"
I expressed surprise. They'd been quite nice to me, and besides, I was moving in a month or so to the big city (by local standards).
She sounded relieved to hear that, but then went on to ask me about my rent. 700 pounds a month, I said.
And what did I get for that, she asked? The front half of the property?
Nope, just a room. A large bed, a now defunct mini-fridge, a closet and a TV the size of my palm that I'd never used. She gasped in shock, and went on to explain that at the price I was paying, I could have had a whole house! She began calling over to the other denizens of the rapidly filling bar, asking them if they agreed I was being ripped off. A chorus of ayes came back.
At this point, she was drunk enough that she began saying that I was clearly a student, like her son, and it was terrible I'd been taken advantage of in that manner. I tried to explain that while I'm a trainee, I actually am a fully qualified doctor and that I do, in fact, get paid. Not as much as I'd like, but I have little in the way of expenses. These words fell on deaf (and drunk) ears.
She began offering that I move in with her, she told me she had a large house with 5 empty bedrooms, and that it was a sheer waste to have them lie empty while I paid out my arsehole elsewhere for nothing. I said that was far too kind of her, but I was locked in anyway, and would have to move.
At this point, she had another half a pint down the gullet, and began elaborating on why my landlords were bad people. Did I know they were swingers?? Had they ever propositioned me??
I reacted by straightening up, a dozen things I'd paid no need to clicking into place in my head. But no, I said, I hadn't known, and I don't think they ever asked me to join in their bed!
She sniffed, saying she was surprised. Then she asked me if I was married. I said, not yet. No kids either? Not that I know of!
Well.. Her son might well be single and coming by soonish..
Uh.. I'm straight as an arrow, last time I checked. I told her that I appreciated the offer, but I'm sure I'd be lynched by all the girls in town who languished in a state of dejection after they'd found out he was gay. She still demanded I move in, as she felt personally affronted by the violation of Scottish Hospitality that my landlords had engaged in, preying on a foreigner who hadn't known better.
I told her I hadn't had much in the way of choices, as the only other listing on Spare Room had been a dingy attic room halfway to nowhere, for 550 pounds to boot. When weighed against the competition, I felt like 700 for a property closer to the center of town wasn't too much of an ask.
I'd been bought a round of drinks, and then bought one round for the table myself. I found myself palpating Tattoo Lady's nose after she complained it always felt congested, and asked her if she'd ever been checked for a deviated nasal septum. No, came the answer, but she had poked a hole in it by doing too much coke in her teens. The grass was greener and the coke was whiter back in the day, she sighed wistfully.
In those days, the stuff wasn't cut and didn't have a decent chance of killing you. Or leaving you K-holing when you'd hoped for a quick buzz. I agreed, and revealed sotto voce that I'd once done a bit of Bolivian Nose Candy in a nightclub bathroom. I'd already been challenged on if it was alright for me to drink and vape as a doctor, and this went by uncontested. Who hasn't had a dissolute youth?
The tattooed lady said she'd been clean for decades, and tried to keep the local kids straight, not that they'd listen. She then went on to talk about her struggles with bipolar disorder, and how she felt that she was often treated in a very dismissive way by women, with particular opprobrium for the typical nosy receptionist types who demanded to know more clinical details before begrudgingly doling out an appointment, just for the sake of gossip. Remember, this is a really small town. She went on to praise a few of the local doctors, though half of them had seemingly retired by the time I came into the picture. She bemoaned the fact that these days, nobody really had the time to talk, and I tried to explain that the NHS, in its wisdom, tries to screen aggressively in an effort to avoid being overwhelmed, and the higher you go, the less time you'll have with progressively more qualified people.
At about this point, I find out that the lady who just took over tending the bar works at the local medical practice. I ask her not to divulge my drinking habits, and she winks and say she won't tell if I don't. I go on to tell tall tales about how, when I'd visited the pub close to the nearest care home, I'd almost been confident that a few of the people drinking merrily were residents with dementia who really ought not to have been consuming alcohol alongside their meds. This was mostly an exaggeration, as the only confirmed sighting was a gentleman who had been seen as an outpatient with early dementia, and his meds were only cautioned when drinking.
I made more smalltalk, enjoying a rare opportunity to observe the locals in the natural environment. I even learned a few things about cultural norms, such as how in those parts, overt displays of affection had been considered unseemly until quite recently. One of the ladies complained about how her elderly father only replied with a gruff that's nice when she told him she loved him. A shame, but the younger generations were better about these things.
I preened internally at some rather effusive praise. I was told I was a model doctor, and that the ladies had gotten a "good vibe" off me from the start, and felt they could open up. I'm not sure how much of that was due to my usual politeness and ability to seem like I was intently hanging on to every word people tell me while my mind wanders, and how much of it was the beer. But I'll take what I can get.
The lady who had offered to take me in wouldn't let up. I asked if she had a partner, experience in these parts telling me it was a more polite approach as compared to assuming someone was married. She told me her husband was a darling and wouldn't say a word if she insisted. I politely reiterated that I'd be quite happy to pay, and any sum below 700 quid was fine by me. She wouldn't hear it. I insisted that she at least talk to the gentleman, and reconsider it when sober, but this hurt her pride, and she puffed up and told me that her word was her bond, regardless of blood-alcohol content. Her tattooed friend nodded reassuringly.
At this point, she insisted it was time to go home, though her friend cajoled her to stay for another round. I snuck in the opportunity to pay for it. In response, she perked up and said that even if I didn't pay a penny, I could cover drinks and make tea as a way of paying my way. I said I was more than happy to do the former, and already was, as a small token of appreciation for letting me know how badly I was being ripped off, but as to the latter, if she expected me to cook she'd better lower her standards and be ready for food poisoning.
She assured me I couldn't be that bad, could I?
At any rate, she said she was going home, and invited me to come with, so that I could scope out "my" room. I said that the gentlemanly thing to do would be to walk her home, and I would be happy to have a word with her husband if he was in.
Along the way, she stopped at a nearby convenience store and asked if I wanted anything to drink. I demurred, but she insisted on picking something, and I said I'll have whatever she's having. There was a bit of a faff at the counter as her phone's contactless payment app asked her to scan her face first, something she was too far gone to manage. I was about to pull up my own card when she figured something out, and I grabbed the bag loaded with wine and soft drinks. It was evident that cashiers were well accustomed to handling the drunk and rowdy, I asked if another Indian I'd met there still worked at the place, but was informed he'd moved to Spain. Lucky bugger.
We went the same route I'd normally take, her house was just a street over. It's a good thing I came along, because she was far from steady on her feet. Along the way, she said something that explained her distaste for my current hosts better than just her dislike of their lifestyle could. It turned out that my landlord's brother had knocked up her sister, and that her family had been embroiled in a lawsuit to establish paternity. This had been before quick and easy DNA testing, and they hadn't been able to win. The father's family had never accepted the kid, but he was older than me now and doing perfectly fine for himself. The rest of the walk was otherwise uneventful, barring her rehashing previous conversation while drunk to the gills.
We came to her property, which I must say is lovely. She let us in, and I was greeted by a small shih tzu, wagging its tail away as I scratched him under the chin. She called over and asked if liked dogs.
Love them, I said. And it's absolutely true, though my preference leans towards larger breeds. This one seemed nice, if yappy, and was happy to do laps around his mistress while she called it all kinds of incredibly derogatory names in a most endearing fashion.
She showed me around, introducing my putative sleeping space with the same enthusiasm as a stage magician or the show runner in a Monty Hall problem. It wasn't terrible, nary a goat nor a super car in sight. A little cramped, but for the price of free this beggar isn't choosy. I was offered the run of the place, though if my present habits are any precedent, I hardly come out of my room.
She produced a bottle of wine and began pouring us a glass each. I asked her where her husband was, and she said he was down the street, visiting his mother, who wasn't doing too well. She tried calling him, but he didn't pick up, so she ended up FaceTiming another woman.
A quick recap followed, and when she turned the phone over to me, I genuinely thought I was talking to her daughter and asked the same. She laughed, saying she was her best friend, but I could tell she was pleased. Accidental flattery will get you anywhere, I say.
She had some kind of role in the educational system, and expressed her frustration at the severe issues she ran into trying to get several kids assessed for learning difficulties. I mentioned that I had ADHD myself, and part of my interest in psychiatry arose from a desire to help out people in a similar boat. I explained that it had taken me three months to get assessed even with other medical professionals pulling strings out of collegiality, but that it dismayed me that kids could go years and grades without assessment and much needed help.
At this point, my would-be host asked if we'd like to step outside for a smoke. I accepted a cigarette, too drunk to particularly hold myself to my usual abstinence, and we went out into their large, but dimly lit garden. She had music playing, and I began to feel growing consternation as she began dancing with me, drawing my hand to her waist and then tugging it lower. She was drunk enough that I didn't face much issue in carefully avoiding it, and once cigarettes burned out, came back in her wake, making sure to close the doors and keep the draft out.
She excused herself, and ran to the toilet and proceeded to relieve herself with the door open. This was awkward, to say the least, and I settled for standing a good distance away and politely pretending I didn't hear her coughing either. I eventually got concerned enough that I asked if she was okay, and was told she was fine, it's just that cigarettes hadn't agreed with her.
She came out, properly dressed, thank god. She asked me if I'd like a coffee, and I agreed, but insisted on making it for the two of us. At this point in time, her phone rang, and I could hear her husband on the other end, saying he was walking home.
I'd just about finished up the coffee when he came in, heralded by the dog's barks, and didn't seem too surprised by my presence. I believe that at some point she'd mentioned that they'd had a guest over. I introduced myself, and he seemed like a decent sort, turning out to be a manager of several offshore oil rigs.
She revealed that she ran a wedding boutique, one I'd walked past while on my way to my last haircut. I take back what I said about purchasing clothing not being an option in Small Scottish Town, at least if you're a bride-to-be.
I apologized for the rather irregular situation, explaining that while I greatly appreciated the kindness his wife had offered me, I felt that I couldn't take advantage of her in her current state, and certainly not without running it by the other relevant stakeholder, her husband (the dog seemed pleased with my company). He seemed entirely fine with it, or at least was too polite to tell me to scram. I guess his wife did have a point about him going along with her suggestions.
His wife interrupted my excuses by saying that it was fine, she wasn't just bringing someone in from the street, was she?
I pointed out that she had, in fact, brought me in from the street. This was duly ignored as a mere technicality unworthy of undermining the spirit of her claim.
At any rate, I think I had been polite enough while trying to decline the offer, and said I'd give the two of them time to think it over. I assured them that there would be absolutely no hard feelings if they changed their mind, and I would probably figure something out in terms of a place to live regardless. If I'd been paying 700 a month for this long, it was clearly within my budget.
I walked back home, and that was that. I probably might take them up on it, assuming that the passage of time and the elimination of liquor doesn't prompt second thoughts on their end.
Inside, I was more than a tad bit thankful that four pints hadn't addled my senses, and that her husband hadn't walked in to find us in flagrante delicto, not that I had been interested.
Nice people, the Scots, and at their best when you and they have comparable amounts of alcohol in your system.
I've been thinking about conflict vs mistake theory lately, especially since the events of October in Israel last year.
I've been particularly trying to understand where support for Palestine (and Hamas, implicitly or not) comes from. Much has already been written about this of course, whether it's the bigotry of small differences or the trap of the "oppressor/oppressed thinking," the hierarchy of oppression, and so on.
What I found striking and want to discuss here though is the strain of thought responding to "how can LGBT+ support Palestine" by declaring, e.g., from Reddit:
It's easier to focus on getting gay rights when you're not being genocided.
Or from a longer piece:
The interviewer asks him, “What’s your response to people who say that you’re not safe in Palestine as a queer person?” Dabbagh responded, “First and foremost, I would go to Palestine in a heartbeat. I have no fear. I love my people and my people love me. And I want to be there and be part of the movement that ends up leading to queer liberation for liberated Palestinian people. If you feel that such violence exists for queer people in the Middle East, what are you doing to change that for that community? The first step is the liberation of Palestine.
I don't claim it's the most common strain of thinking, but to me this largely cashes out as "they are homophobic because of oppression/imperialism/Jews." As an aside, contrast with the way "economic anxiety" plays out in the US.
The part I want to focus on is this kind of blend of mistake and conflict theory -- there's conflict, yes, but it has a cause which can be addressed and then we'll all be on the same side. I'm skeptical of this blend, which seems to essentially just be false consciousness: if not for an external force you would see our interests align.
I think this mode of thinking is becoming increasingly popular however and want to point to the two most recent video games I put serious time into (but didn't finish) as examples: Baldur's Gate 3 and Unicorn Overlord (minorish spoilers ahead)
[Again, minorish spoilers for Unicorn Overlord and Baldur's Gate 3 ahead]
Baldur's Gate 3 was part of a larger "vibe shift" in DnD which I won't get into here except to say I think a lot of it is misguided. Nevertheless, there are two major examples of the above:
The Gith'Yanki are a martial, fascist seeming society who are generally aggressive powerful assholes. A major character arc for one of your team Gith'Yanki team members however, is learning she had been brainwashed and fed lies not just about the leader of the society and her goals, but also the basic functioning of the society. For instance, a much-discussed cure for a serious medical condition turns out to be glorious euthanasia.
The Gith have been impressed with a false consciousness, you see, and your conflict with them is largely based on a misunderstanding of the facts.
More egregious is the character Omeluum, who you meet early in the adventure. Omeluum is a "mind flayer" or "illithid":
Mind flayers are psionic aberrations with a humanoid-like figure and a tentacled head that communicate using telepathy. They feast on the brains of intelligent beings and can enthrall other creatures to their will.
But you see, even these creatures turn out to be the victim of false consciousness--Omeluum is a mind flayer who has escaped the mind control of the "Elder Brain." After fleeing, he happily "joined the good guys." You might think it's an issue that his biology requires he consume conscious brains, but fortunately he only feeds
on the brains of creatures of the Underdark 'that oppose the Society's goals', and wishes to help others of his kind by discovering a brain-free diet.
In the world of DnD (which has consciously been made to increasingly mimic our own world with mixed results), it seems that but for a few bad actors we could all get along in harmony.
Anecdotally, the last time I ran a DnD campaign it eventually devolved into the party trying to "get to the root" of every conflict, whether it was insisting on finding a way to get goblins to stop killing travelers by negotiation a protection deal with the nearby village which served both, or trying to talk every single cultist out of being a cult member. I'm all for creative solutions, but I found it got pretty tedious after a while.
The other game, Unicorn Overlord, is even more striking, albeit a little simpler. Unicorn Overlord is a (very enjoyable) strategy game where you slowly build up an army to overthrow the evil overlord. What you quickly discover, however, is that almost without exception every follower of the evil overlord is literally mind-controlled. The main gameplay cycle involves fighting a lieutenant's army, then using your magical ring to undo the mind control. After, the lieutenant is invariably horrified and joins your righteous cause.
I should note this is far from unusual in this genre, which requires fights but also wants team-ups. It's a lot like Marvel movies which come up with reasons for heroes to fight each other then team up, like a misunderstanding or even mind control. Wargroove was especially bad at this, where you would encounter a new friendly and say something like "Hello, a fine field for cattle, no?" but the wind is strong or something so they hear "Hello, a fine field for battle, no?" and then you fight. Nevertheless, the mind control dynamic in Unicorn Overlord is almost exclusively the only explanation used.
Funnily enough, I think in these an other examples this is seen as "adding nuance," but I find it ultimately as childish as a cartoon-twirling villain. The villain is still needed in fact (Imperialists, the Evil Overlord, The Elder Brain, The Queen of the Gith), but it's easier to explain away one Evil person who controls everything than try to account for it at scale.
Taken altogether, I can't help but think these are all symptoms of the same thing: struggling to explain conflict. The "false consciousness" explanation is powerful, but seems able to explain anything about people's behavior.
My suspicion is that mistakes and genuine conflict can both occur, but this blended approach leaves something to be desired I think. I had an idea a while ago about a potential plot twist for Unicorn Overlord where it's revealed you aren't freeing anyone -- you're simply bringing them under your own control but you don't notice. That feels a bit like the fantasy all of this is getting at I think: I have my views because of Reasons or Ethics or Whatever, and you would agree with me if not for Factor I'm Immune To.
Happy birthday to us! Hard to believe we've been the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum for two whole years. @ZorbaTHut, what a remarkable framework you've constructed; everyone else, what remarkable things you've constructed on that framework. Thanks for hanging out with us and getting into very kind, respectful, politely-worded fistfights about anything and everything under the sun.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
(Proverbs 27:17)
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of July 29, 2024
Contributions for the week of August 5, 2024
Contributions for the week of August 12, 2024
Contributions for the week of August 19, 2024
- Several nominated posts on the intertwining of activist politics and medical practice
Contributions for the week of August 26, 2024
For much of my life, people who hear bits and pieces of my biography would say “You should write a book!”. So perhaps finally, I begin to.
Here's the elevator pitch:
I'm an American who came of age outside America, a soldier from a pacifist family, an atheist from a faith-healing cult in Indiana. An intellectually pretentious infantry sergeant. A middle-class dilettante among rough soldiers, a semi-retired middle-aged house-husband with a phone full of cat pictures. A pot-smoking gamer and master-class pistol shot. Hunter, fisherman, amateur home cook. Good with kids and animals, bad with women.
As a short and non-inclusive list: I've been a missionary, translator, manual laborer, martial artist, drug mule, camp counselor, soldier, punk guitarist, research assistant, firearms trainer.
Debated theologians, imams and feminists, drank and sauna'd with Russians, smoked weed and chicken with Kurds, hunted deer and trouble with native Americans. Built orphanages in Ukraine and blew them up in Iraq. I speak bits and parts of ten or so languages, been on every continent but Australia and Antarctica (Africa and South America are technicalities, but those count), and all forty-eight contiguous states.
At the same time, I'm a skinny nerd who grew up on the internet, cut his teeth in the chans and treats online politics like bros treat fantasy football. Had an erratic but broad education, presented professional research at APA conferences, published history monographs and main-tanked a guild through BWL. Can calculate bullet drop, p-value and THACO.
I've performed musically in front of thousands of people, academically to hundreds and athletically for dozens. Conducted military funerals, psychological research and church worship teams. Attended the foundings of PAX, the first non-orthodox church in Novocheboksarsk, MOPH 180, Sniper Platoon 2/11, and the Michigan branch of the Proud Boys. I've sat behind a sniper rifle in the ruins of what was once Babylon, behind a Telecaster on the stage of a megachurch, and behind a conference table in the main hall of Palmer House.
For food, eaten everything from live dragonfly larvae to scrambled pig's brains. I've had pizza with mayo for sauce, kittie kabobs and roasted horse, twenty-year-old MREs and raw deer heart, straight out the ribcage. Drunk everything from prison wine to Romanian ration vodka, HofBrau Oktoberfest to Busch Lite, McCallan 25 to Dr. McGillicutty's Cherry Schnapps. Kefir, Kvass, Tiger.
For work I've trained green-broke mustangs and worse-broke cops, power-washed semi-trucks, sold legal guns and illegal hooch, shingled roofs, tied steel, smuggled dope into an embassy, fabricated windows and pallets with the Amish, driven diabetics to dialysis, and located underground utilities. Planted crops with illegal aliens, detasseled corn with midwest hicks, worked on climbing walls with hippies, washed shit off dairy cows. I don't put any of that on my CV.
Along the way, conflict was inevitable. Fought trailer park kids in Indiana, Gopkini in Moscow, Marines in Vegas, reform school kids on a soccer field, Mortar platoon in the quad, a cafeteria full of home-schoolers at Bob Jones University, drunks behind a bar in Flint Mi., the Al-Janabis in central Iraq.
Stranger perhaps were the ladies involved. Fighter not a lover, but they have their charms! Italo-hispanic painters, semi-pro russian hookers, a mohawk on long walks with amish girls, scrawny white boy at an all-black dance with a borderline little person, suicidal lesbians, a leather jacket with a married chick at an Ani DiFranco concert, and a guild-destroying hookup with main heals at a gaming convention. Just a selection of the awkwardness that has been romance.
My name is Sgt. Scott. I remember some of this shit and I'm writing it down. That's the pitch.
Ever since Covid, I've been writing through some of my past experiences. Much of this is half-baked digressions mostly to get memories down, but even so. Over the coming year I will be writing steadily on biographical stuff, and doing interviews with family members and old friends. I don't know if this will ever be a book, but it's a start. Be posting some of those projects here. Feedback is appreciated.
If you read this far and want to help, LMK which of the above sound the most/least intriguing.
Trying out a new weekly thread idea.
This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.
@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
DISCLAIMER: This is a very long post, it is the length of a novelette. I've edited the post to break it up into sections, hopefully that makes it easier to get through.
Hanoi:
It was 11pm, and my sister and I had just exited the airport into what felt like a more spacious, open-air version of Kowloon Walled City. The noise and chaos at the exit was palpable, and rows of people stood in front of the doors clutching handwritten placards bearing names of loved ones or clients they hoped to meet, all while touts amassed just outside, aggressively pitching taxi rides to any unfortunate travellers who wandered too close. Intense humidity pressed down on us, and a thick, choking smog permeated the air, almost as if cigarette smoke were blanketing the entire city. We had made it. At long last, after several flight delays and a long layover at Tan Son Nhat international airport, we were in Hanoi.
We booked a Grab to our hotel. The app gave us a vehicle number, but finding the actual car was another matter entirely, since the road outside the airport was a churning sea of cars and motorbikes. Our driver sent a photo of his location, and after several minutes of weaving between vehicles, clutching our backpacks and trying not to get flattened, we finally spotted his car. As we slowly pulled away from the airport, we noticed him quietly tapping out a message on his phone, and a moment later he ran it through a translator and handed it to us. It was a request in Vietnamese to cancel the ride in the app and pay him directly, presumably so he could avoid Grab's commission. We declined so as to not give up the reassurance of the app’s tracking, at least not five minutes into our first ride. He said nothing in response and drove us across the Red River, past rows of shacks and eateries, and into the winding alleys of the Old Quarter, where he finally dropped us off at our hotel. We collapsed onto the bed in our room upon arrival.
This was our very first proper experience in Vietnam, and it is probably the most intense culture shock I have ever felt. It goes without saying that travelling here without the help of a guide to arrange things on your behalf can be very stressful, and if you are sensitive to smells, sounds, crowds, heat, humidity, have terrible executive functioning or are generally easily made overwhelmed and uncomfortable, Vietnam is not for you. It's by far the craziest travel experience I have ever had - in both good and bad ways - and I certainly don't recommend it for anyone looking for a typical relaxing vacation. If anything, you'll need a vacation to relax after your vacation. But if you're willing to stick through the intense sensory overload, you'll see and do some of the coolest things you'll ever experience, stuff that you will be talking about for years after you've done them.
Hanoi has a storied history as the capital of Vietnam. In 1010, Emperor Ly Thai To relocated the capital from Hoa Lu to the location of the modern-day city, calling the new city Thang Long ("Rising Dragon"). It has remained the capital throughout Vietnamese history, excepting a brief period in the late 18th to early 20th century when the Tay Son Dynasty moved the capital south to Hue. During French rule, Hanoi was the capital of all of Indochina, and it has a large concentration of historic Vietnamese and French-style architecture as a result, as well as many spectacular and eclectic amalgamations of the two architectural styles. The city has developed over the years into an anarchic mish-mash of churches, temples, shacks and skyscrapers that barely seem to fit together, but somehow work to create a coherent and characterful urban fabric.
The Old Quarter is probably the most famous and recognisable part of the city, taking all of these aspects of the city and turbocharging them to an extreme. Established during the very inception of Thang Long, it is a historic district of 36 streets where craftsmen from villages around the city would assemble to sell goods, and even now each street is still named after a specific trade or guild, often starting with the word "Háng", the word for "wares" in Vietnamese. Many of these bustling streets continue to specialise in the same crafts they did centuries ago, but the area has modernised in a wonderfully haphazard way. Ancient temples packed with priceless relics sit shoulder to shoulder with crumbling French colonial facades, wedged between quirky little shops and cafes that look like they’ve been stacked on top of each other with zero planning. The Old Quarter practically invites you to check out every little nook and cranny, and large trees festooned with colourful lanterns cast some much-welcome shade over the pavements and roads while you wander around the maze of craft streets.
Of course, exploring is easier said than done. Sidewalks in Hanoi are virtually unusable - not only will restaurants and cafes arrange dinky little plastic tables and chairs on the pavement as an unofficial extension of their seating area, people will park their mopeds in rows on the sidewalk and even do their washing there while watching the world pass by. As a pedestrian, you're forced onto the very sides of the roads, alongside a veritable cornucopia of motorcycles and cars and bikes and rickshaws that endlessly jostle for space while honking loudly at each other. There is a lot of honking, too, since the road is so crowded that people honk not necessarily out of irritation and impatience, but simply use them in the same way one would a bicycle bell to let others know where they are. Crossing the road is much like playing a real-life version of Frogger - no one will stop for you, not even at pedestrian crossings; you just have to pick your moment, step out with confidence, and trust that the swarm of motorbikes will weave around you as you go (note: wait for cars, they will not stop). This can raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels at first, but you get used to it; by the second day I found myself crossing the street without stressing too much. There is always a base-line sense of anxiety, though - it's possible to encounter a motorcyclist that will not bother to move aside or account for where you're going, and things can occasionally get terrifying. If in doubt, just shadow a local. They move through the street with the nonchalance of someone who's done this a thousand times - because they have.
On our first day, we mainly just passed through the Old Quarter's buzzy streets while on our way to the complex of sites in and around Ba Dinh Square, the place where Ho Chi Minh first read the Declaration of Independence. Probably the most recognisable of these sites is the HCM mausoleum, a grey granite structure that serves as the resting place of the famous revolutionary, with his embalmed body entombed within a coffin inside a marble chamber. It's a hilariously extra thing to do, especially considering that his wish was to be cremated and to have his ashes placed within three urns in the north, centre and south of the country, but they preferred to follow in the footsteps of the USSR than honour the wishes of their beloved leader I suppose. The entire complex and much of the city surrounding the mausoleum can only be described as a weird communist fever dream, with screens playing videos of revolutionary material, big posters of "Uncle Ho" plastered everywhere, propaganda shops selling pamphlets of his face and viciously anti-American slogans meant to promote his surreal cult of personality, and so on. They’ve even enshrined the cars he used. I'll grant that the mausoleum itself is quite impressive, though we didn't do much in it - we basically stood in a line and moved slowly towards the mausoleum under the watchful eyes of soldiers, saw the embalmed body of the man himself, and left. Nearby we also visited the bright yellow Presidential Palace and the stilt house in which he lived from 1958 to 1969, yet another closely guarded relic which we were allowed just enough freedom to examine for less than a minute.
Frankly, it is such a weird place to be. We left with the strange sense that Ho Chi Minh was more than just a leader; rather, the man was the equivalent of Vietnamese Jesus. What made it even more uncanny is that there are apparently rumours that the body inside the coffin might not even be real, and some who were inside the Vietnamese military report that the actual body looks a lot less spry than the possible wax figure contained inside the mausoleum. I don't have an opinion on this, but I recommend it just for what a fascinating look it is into an extant modern-day cult of personality; one that's still in the process of being shaped.
We popped into a cafe outside the mausoleum and grabbed a coconut coffee (which was excellent, by the way), then moved on. The next place we decided to hit up was the ancient Temple of Literature, a Confucian temple founded by Ly Thanh Tong in 1070. It's a historic site of serious importance in that it hosted the country's first national university, one that continuously ran for 700 years straight and educated many bureaucrats, nobility and other elite members of Vietnamese society. We entered the temple through a beautiful white stone gate, and passed through five exquisitely landscaped courtyards filled to the brim with Confucian statuary and historic turtle steles honouring those who passed the royal exams. The temple was bustling with both tourists and graduating children when we visited; I suppose there's an informal tradition of bringing those who have passed their exams here to honour them.
We then headed northeast so we could visit the remains of the Thang Long imperial citadel, established during the very founding of the city in the 11th century. It was built on the former remains of a Chinese fortress dating back to the 7th century and was the seat of the Vietnamese court for centuries before it was moved to Hue. Initially, it was built in three concentric circles consisting of a defensive fortification, an imperial city, and an inner forbidden city. The Ly and Tran court expanded and renovated the complex year upon year, and after the Le Dynasty expelled Ming China from Vietnam they renamed it Dong Kinh and ordered repairs to the citadel. Even after the tumult of the Mac Dynasty and the lengthy civil war between it and the Revival Le Dynasty, the structure of the citadel was largely preserved. After the destructive war between the Nguyen and Tay Son, Gia Long (the founder of the Nguyen Dynasty; more on him later) ordered a large-scale reconstruction of the Thang Long citadel, rebuilding much of it in their own syncretic Vauban-inspired style. Much of the extant structures in Thang Long date to this period, though we found not too much left when we visited since most of it was razed during French colonisation to make space for barracks. The remaining major structures were the impressive Doan Mon Gate, the Flag Tower, Hau Lau palace and the North Gate, with much of the site being an archeological complex containing many remnants from the previous dynasties. Large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts have been found during archeological digs, spanning many centuries of Vietnamese history. We visited all of the main areas, as well as a small museum within the complex meant to showcase some of the finds and describe the storied history of the former imperial centre.
After seeing the citadel, we walked northwards towards the West Lake and passed a scenic concentration of French-style architecture on our way there, including one of the most important and beautiful Catholic churches in Hanoi: Cua Bac Parish Church. It's a large custard-yellow church built in front of the North Gate, designed by French architect Ernest Hebrard in eclectic style with strong hints of art deco decoration. He also incorporated traditional Vietnamese stylistic elements into the design of the church, making it a fascinating example of French-Vietnamese syncretic architecture. It's situated in a nice tree-filled lane that's absolutely covered from top to toe with gorgeous villas; so much so that it almost feels like walking in a Wes Anderson movie.
There are a good number of important historic temples dotted around the shores of the West Lake. The first one we visited was Quan Thanh Temple, a relatively quiet 11th century Taoist religious site featuring a mammoth 9-tonne bronze statue of Tran Vu cast in 1677. It's a monumental piece of Vietnamese artistry; in my opinion the altar is the most spectacular one in Hanoi and it's my single favourite religious site in the entire city for that reason alone. The next temple we visited, Tran Quoc Pagoda, was a famous Buddhist temple situated on an island in the middle of the West Lake with a history dating back to the 6th century, making it the oldest temple in Hanoi (though, most of the extant structures date to the 17th century). It boasts a spectacular 11-story stupa that's 15 metres in height, with each story containing a gemstone statue of the Amitabha Buddha.
On our second night in Hanoi, we visited Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre. It's a theatre that specialises in water puppetry shows, a traditional Vietic performance art that boasts a history stretching all the way back to the 11th century. Such shows were originally conducted in wet rice farms, involving small groups of performers who moved beautiful lacquered puppets through the waist-deep paddies while musicians played Vietnamese orchestral music and sung chéo operatic folkstories, and these performances can still be found throughout the country in pagodas and theatres. For our part, we were highly impressed by how these performers used the watery setting to its fullest extent, complete with very creatively designed puppets capable of floating and bobbing through the pool and even spitting water out at each other. There was a small English audio guide to the show which we paid for, though in retrospect I don't think it was very necessary - the folk stories are mostly told through the puppetry itself, and the plots are simple enough that one can usually grasp it on their own. Most of these stories paint humorous and whimsical pictures of rural Vietnamese life, and unless you're a total cynic I think it's impossible not to be at least a little bit charmed by it.
We woke up the second day and ate complementary breakfast in the top floor of our hotel, then left to explore the Old Quarter properly. It quickly became one of my favourite places in Hanoi - there’s always something interesting to find within these streets, and it’s very worth ducking into little holes in the wall to see what’s inside. When we were there we visited many quiet temples nestled within the urban sprawl, the oldest of which was the 11th-century Bach Ma Temple, its gilded, dimly-lit halls still perfumed with the sweet aroma of incense. Other times we found charming little outlets like a cafe hailing from 1946 which was the first cafe to serve Vietnamese egg coffee, a strong Robusta coffee made sweet and rich with a whipped cream topping made from raw eggs and condensed milk (as an aside, Vietnamese coffee is generally amazing, unsurprisingly so for a country that produces so much of it). There were also many historic residences hidden within the scrawl of shacks such as 87 Ma May ancient house, a well-preserved Hanoian house from the late 19th century complete with a traditional store and household altar. I was pleasantly surprised by the Old Quarter, really; I've heard Vietnamese call it a "tourist ghetto" but it's popular for a good reason - there's a bottomless depth to these old craft streets that's truly unparalleled. It feels like you could live here for years and still keep discovering new things within it.
At the south end of the Old Quarter is Hoan Kiem Lake, a natural freshwater body surrounded by leafy, tree-filled lanes. According to a Vietnamese legend, Emperor Le Loi (the rebel leader who defeated Ming China and established the Later Le Dynasty, the longest running Vietnamese dynasty in history) was granted a magic sword by the Dragon King, which he used to wage his wars and reclaim Vietnamese sovereignty. Later on, a turtle god from the lake acting on behalf of its master asked for the sword back, which he graciously returned, and from then on he renamed the lake to its current title, which means "Lake of the Returned Sword". There are many towers and temples in and around the area, the most recognisable being Thap Rua (Turtle Tower), an iconic structure in the lake that's been rebuilt many times ever since its construction in the 1400s, with the current structure built in 1886 in honour of Le Loi.
There's also Ngoc Son Temple, a delightful little religious site on an island with a bright red bridge leading to it. It was built in the early 19th century and originally devoted to the Three Sages, but soon the Vietnamese national hero who repelled the Mongol invasions, Tran Hung Dao, was incorporated into the temple as well. We entered through a colourful gate that guarded the entrance to the complex, which led to a small but atmospheric collection of golden-red buildings with scenic views of the lake. There are many parts of Hanoi that are very beautiful, and they're like calm oases within the sheer chaos that typifies most of the city, though they can get weird at times. In one particularly strange temple hall, we managed to find the preserved remnants of giant turtles from Hoan Kiem Lake, meant to pay homage to Le Loi's heavenly encounter.
In Vietnam, it's never possible to get too comfortable: when walking around the lake there we came across a number of pushy touts that tried to sell us cyclo rides. This got irritating quick, but it was also interesting since I did notice they were not uncommon on the streets - they've long been phased out in many rapidly-modernising Southeast Asian countries where they're mostly considered a relic of the past, but apparently not in Vietnam - I suppose traffic in many Hanoian streets remains so congested and slow that using a rickshaw is still a viable method of transport, though it seems to be something tourists primarily use at this point. In general, we dealt with them by ignoring them and walking away; they'll take the hint and won't bother you after a short while.
However, an unpleasant aspect of Hanoi that's much harder to ignore (at least for those who are sensitive to noxious smells) is the at-times intense air pollution. Your experience probably depends on the time of year you visit, but it can get bad, and towards the end of our second day we were feeling very faint and needed to pop into Lotte Tower just for the filtered air. Seriously, if you can't take that, I suggest skipping Hanoi, or at most spending one day in the city just to see what it's like. There's a lot of beautiful historical buildings and artefacts in it as well as many charming streets, but the dense smog that often blankets the city can make one feel like all these priceless relics and bits of culture have somehow been cast into hell. So consider where your comfort level lies and decide accordingly.
Ultimately, my experience with Hanoi was one of blistering contradictions; it's a city that's packed to the brim with intoxicatingly rich heritage and culture, run by a highly propagandising communist government (on paper at least) that seems intent on promoting an intense cult of personality, but in spite of that the city itself can feel hilariously overwhelming, polluted and anarchic, without regard for any concept of "collective good". It’s almost like a Vietnamese version of Victorian London, except even stranger because it feels like a bunch of wet-rice farmers have been unceremoniously thrust into industrial modernity; many habits like washing dishes on the cramped sidewalks and using motorcycles as an automated extension of bikes seem to be directly cribbed from village culture, except they’re doing so in an overcrowded metropolis absolutely not suited for these practices. I have no idea how anything gets done in this ant farm of a city, but Vietnam is the fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia and has managed to monopolise a large amount of world manufacturing so clearly they're doing something right. I really wonder how they’ll continue to modernise as time goes on.
We returned to our hotel once we were done sightseeing (the sheer overload was seriously tiring us out by this point) and climbed into a bus booked for us by our accommodation; the driver promptly took us out of the crowded streets of Hanoi and turned into a country road that led deep into the rice farms of rural Vietnam. The ride took about two hours, and it was maybe the most bumpy and loud ride I've ever had on any vacation. Our driver drove into the night, all the while honking at motorcyclists and cars as he went, speaking loudly on his phone, and rolling down his window to talk to random people - at one point he stopped and repeatedly yelled something at us in Vietnamese; we had no clue what he was saying. He continued on to our destination anyway and we heaved a deep collective sigh of relief. When you're in the Southeast Asian countryside, you certainly don't want to be left stranded on the side of the road.
He stopped the car in an isolated, unpaved road in the middle of nowhere, and we stepped out into the darkness. A slight drizzle had begun, so we ducked into a small complex of lakeside bungalows and asked for our room. The man at the counter was very welcoming to us - maybe the first person in all of Vietnam so far that hadn't been completely and utterly incomprehensible - and made some friendly conversation before handing us the keys to our room and showing us how everything worked. We ate some food at the small dining area they provided, then hunkered down in the cosy wooden room and got ready to sleep. Before we turned off the lights in the bungalow, we heard an animal crawling on our roof.
Trang An:
The next morning, we woke up with sun shining on our faces; pulling down the blinds revealed large limestone peaks reflected in a shallow lake. We were now deep within the Trang An landscape complex, a stunning karst-filled region of the Red River Delta that looms large in the country's history, having been continuously inhabited for 30,000 years straight. Bowls of chicken pho came to us as soon as we sat down at the dining area, though it featured very light broth that was barely spiced.
Once we were done with breakfast we called a Grab car, which slowly made its way through a maze of bumpy, poorly maintained roads to drop us off at the entrance to Mua Caves, a site that's much more famous for its breathtaking lookout over the limestone mountains and rice paddies than it is for any of its caves. This is a popular site to visit, and the area around the mountain contains some overpriced amenities meant to gouge exhausted tourists. The route to the top involved a steep climb up 500 steps, and we did the trek in suffocating heat and humidity that made us feel like we were going to drop dead at any second - the final section of the climb leading to a dragon sculpture at the top of the mountain involved an unfenced scramble up steep rocks in blazing sun, it was so precarious that I'm surprised it hasn't killed someone yet. Though the views were well worth it; as we climbed the panoramic view over the landscape complex became ever more beautiful, and we witnessed a number of wild goats climbing the steep cliffs along the trail we were following. Upon reaching the bottom of the mountain we grudgingly dragged ourselves into one of these overpriced stalls and grabbed a drink. We were so parched that even after leaving the site a man in a shack hollered at us selling sugarcane juice and coconuts and we happily accepted. He hacked apart coconuts on the side of the road for us, which we polished off with gusto.
Note that very few Vietnamese restaurants or cafes have air-conditioning at all - they mostly just give you a cold drink and turn a fan on you, which is not sufficient to deal with the blazing heat and humidity that the entire country experiences in early summer. I can't imagine how it would feel during the hottest part of the year; according to one of our Grab drivers North Vietnam reaches 40+ degree temperatures at the height of summer, which would be absolutely debilitating especially considering how muggy the country is. We found ourselves soaked with sweat every single day of the trip, and it was necessary for us to grab a drink or two after every stop if we didn't want to collapse from exhaustion.
After recovering we grabbed another car to Thai Vi Temple at the south end of the landscape complex. It's a 13th century temple that was built on the site of the former Vu Lam Palace Complex, a military base constructed during the Tran Dynasty to prepare for attacks from the Mongols. The temple pays homage to the old Tran kings, and it's a serene, minimal complex with a front gate flanked by two stone horse statues. The courtyard is surrounded by symmetrically placed tropical ponds and bell towers, and it looks out to a main hall supported by many carved stone pillars. Its interior features many gilded idols of Vietnamese royalty, and when we visited there was an old man inside playing a traditional instrument that granted the temple a tranquil atmosphere. Thai Vi is not the most important temple in Vietnam nor is it the one with the most impressive artistry, it's in fact one of the smaller temples, but in a country where there are shrines around every corner this was one of the most atmospheric ones.
We walked out of Thai Vi on foot, past small little shrines and graves nestled deep within the limestone hills, and grabbed a coconut coffee as well as some spring rolls from a roadside cafe with a bucolic view of the paddy fields. This didn't satiate our hunger, so we also got ourselves a northern style banh mi from the nearby town of Tam Coc (it was tasty and enjoyable enough after a day of exploring, but was rather plain; as is most Northern Vietnamese food). After that we made our way to Bich Dong Pagoda, a set of cosy Buddhist temples nestled into a mountainside with a history dating back to 1428. We walked through a path that passed through a large gate surrounded by rainforest, leading into a series of lovely cave temple halls with a large array of Buddhist statuary tucked behind the stalactites and formations. I enjoyed this temple a lot as well; it was very ethereal and offered views of the forested limestone hills as we climbed up to the caves. The Trang An landscape complex in general has some of the most alluring temples in all of Vietnam, and Thai Vi and Bich Dong alike are no exception.
The next day we decided to take a boat tour around the rivers and waterways of Trang An. We got into a line to board the boats, and were surprised at the sheer insanity of Vietnamese queues - there was no sense of personal space whatsoever, and said queue felt less like a line and more like a competition to see who could cut in front of others the most successfully. To get anywhere in the queue, we had to be very aggressive, and even then it wasn't a smooth or quick experience. There was a woman behind me holding a child, and she stood so close that her kid was kicking me in the back. Every time we moved she would walk ahead so that the tip of her shoe was touching the back of mine; I attempted to compensate by placing my right foot far behind me but eventually just let her through the queue because I was so fed up with having to watch where I stood. This kind of Molochian tragedy of the commons is something that seems to be common in many parts of Vietnam, and while it's fascinating to witness it's also endlessly frustrating and isn't the easiest thing to get used to. Vietnamese aren't stupid about it either; they keenly understand that it isn't ideal, and many of the people we talked to mentioned these as problems.
Things were much more manageable once we actually went on the boat tour; the crowds dispersed and we had space to ourselves. Everyone went in groups of four, and since we were a bit apprehensive about what being in a small boat with Vietnamese would be like we picked up some foreigners for our group then climbed into a rickety boat with a local man who would be rowing us. He immediately tapped me on the shoulder, then passed me - the only guy on the boat - an oar. Apparently, I paid for the coveted experience of doing half (realistically less than a third) of the work of rowing myself, the guide, and three other women to our destination.
So we put on our lifejackets and I got to work. Some other members of the tour intermittently participated in rowing, but I was doing so for almost the entire three hours of the tour, to the point that my arms felt like they were going to fall off. The landscapes we saw were worth the effort, though; we rowed through lush little waterways flanked on each side by towering peaks, ventured into sinuous half-flooded caves decorated with small formations, and visited stunning isolated temples that could only be reached by boat. The Temple of Cao Son was the first one we came across, and what greeted us when we clambered onto shore was an impressive wooden three-story temple hall, complete with gold finishings and a towering statue of Cao Son, the god of the mountain. There were also many ancillary halls nearby, the most spectacular of which was festooned with intricate golden canopies and had a gleaming pagoda-like structure at its very core. Every single one of these temples were framed by breathtaking views of mountains and rainforests, and we spent so much time there that it irritated our guide, who firmly told us "Temple, 10 minute" once we got back into the boat.
We eventually stopped again at a picturesque pagoda jutting out from deep inside the waters of the channel, where he pointed at our cameras and said "Photo". The two French women who were accompanying us on the boat ride snapped a shot, and when it came to our turn we tried to say it wasn't necessary. In response he just turned the boat in a more favourable direction and pointed again. Throughout the tour he treated the entire affair in a doggedly prescriptive way, like he was ordered to check off items on a list; you will stop at this site and you will take the approved amount of time and you will take a photo. It's frankly a bizarre way to treat tourism, and one gets the sense that any kind of remotely responsive customer service culture does not exist in Vietnam at all. Again, it feels like a bunch of rural rice farmers discovering that tourists exist and you can make money off them, but without any real idea of how to cater to them. I'm actually inclined to say it adds to the authenticity of the experience.
The next place we docked at was Suoi Tien Temple, a tranquil complex with an elegant two-story main hall dedicated to Quy Minh, a god of land and water that features in Vietnamese legend. Conscious of how long we were taking this time, we timed ourselves while exploring the temple complex and even managed to grab a few pictures despite the time limit, though the deeper chambers of the temple containing heaps of sumptuous folk-religious Vietnamese artistry did not allow photos. We got back to our boat, without objection from our guide, and ventured into yet another narrow waterway shadowed by mountains.
Our last stop was the Vu Lam Royal Step-Over Palace, founded on yet another section of the Tran kings' military base when they were preparing for the Mongol invasion. This is one of the most picturesque sites in Trang An and is probably the largest temple complex we saw while on the boat tour. The many halls of this site enshrined many statues of what I believe to be Tran Dynasty monarchs, as well as large protector deities that stood guard at the temples' entrances. Probably my favourite temple interior of the whole trip was situated at the very back of the complex, featuring a colourful room with multiple ornate maroon and blue canopies draped around an idol. I can't find too much information about the history of the current modern-day complex, but I'm guessing it's not too old; there's Quoc Ngu writing on a number of the temples so it's likely these temple halls were built in commemoration of the old military base. I wouldn't imagine that wooden structures would persist very well in the muggy Vietnamese climate anyway; even stone and concrete tends to suffer damage quickly when exposed to these tropical conditions.
Once we left the boat, we bought some tea, desserts and pomelo from a shop nearby the ticket office. They offered us a small bag of spice and salt to dip the pomelo segments into, and eating it like that made it far more of a savoury affair. It's interesting! I'm actually not sure why this method of eating fruit hasn't caught on more outside of Southeast Asia, it scratches a strange itch I didn't even know existed. We polished off our meal then jumped into yet another Grab car which took us to the Hoa Lu Ancient Capital, the site of an early Vietnamese cultural, political and religious centre during the late 10th century which played host to some of Vietnam's first independent imperial dynasties; the Dinh, founded by Dinh Tien Hoang, and the Early Le, founded by Le Dai Hanh.
So, some historical context: Dinh Tien Hoang was born as Dinh Bo Linh in Hoa Lu, where he became a military leader at a young age. He saw the establishment of the first semi-independent Vietnamese dynasty (the short-lived Ngo Dynasty), but it was an unstable state, simultaneously unable to gain recognition from the Chinese state and unable to subdue its own regional chiefs. This led to a situation known as the "Anarchy of the Twelve Warlords", where all the regional Vietnamese warlords in practice ruled their own autonomous parts of the Red River Delta with the Ngo kings themselves holding little real power. Dinh Bo Linh effectively conquered his way through each regional warlord's territory one after another and paved the way for the first truly independent unified Vietnamese state, establishing the nation of Dai Co Viet and setting the capital at Hoa Lu. The mountainous limestone topography of the area was strategically chosen so as to make the capital impregnable to attack, with any gaps between the mountains covered by earthen walls ten metres high and fifteen metres thick. Some sections of the wall still exist, and have been excavated by archaeologists.
In 979, Dinh Tien Hoang and his son Dinh Lien were murdered in their sleep by Do Thich, a eunuch attempting to usurp the throne (subsequently, his body was cut into small pieces). After this, it seemed the natural successor would be his surviving six-year-old son Dinh Toan. However, Dinh Tien Hoang's wife and now empress dowager to Dinh Toan, Queen Duong Van Nga, wanted the regent Le Hoan (posthumously titled Le Dai Hanh) to become emperor instead so that Dai Co Viet could have an emperor capable of withstanding the Song invasion, who were trying to take advantage of the political tumult in Dai Viet to reassert control over the area (note Duong Van Nga later became his empress). So in 980 Dinh Toan was deposed and power was transferred from the Dinh clan to the Le clan, marking the beginning of the Early Le Dynasty. In early 981 Emperor Taizong ordered general Hou Renbao to advance into Dai Co Viet, who scored some early military victories over the Viet armies due to their overwhelming manpower, but the Song were decimated by malaria and started infighting. Le Dai Hanh staged an ambush at Chi Lang and managed to capture Hou Renbao and eradicate half of the remaining Song armies, forcing a retreat. Upon return, they were executed in Kaifeng for their military failures.
While all this was happening, Paramesvaravarman I of the southern Hindu-Buddhist state of Champa was also trying to capitalise on all the tumult. On the advice of Ngo Nhat Khanh, an exiled former Vietnamese warlord that ruled during the Ngo dynasty, he sent an expedition into Vietnam in late 979, but it was scuttled by a typhoon; Ngo Nhat Khanh drowned along with the fleet. After repelling the Song invasion, Le Dai Hanh attempted to send envoys to Champa, but Paramesvaravarman I detained them, which incited retaliation from Dai Co Viet. The Viets invaded Champa in 982, killed Parmesvaravarman, and sacked the capital of Indrapura, seizing much territory for themselves. Frankly, it's comical just how tumultuous and eventful Vietnamese history is. It reminds me of that gameplay/lore meme: Vietnam gameplay; rice farming. Vietnam lore; basically Game of Thrones.
We pulled up to the site of the ancient capital and noted there wasn't much left of the old political and ceremonial centre; most of what there was to see on the site were extant 17th century temples dedicated to Dinh Tien Hoang and Le Dai Hanh, along with their tombs (constructed later as well), which I would say is still of some historical interest. The temples had a particularly solemn vibe to them; Dinh Tien Hoang's temple was framed by a unique obelisk-like gate and featured a monumental stone pedestal of a royal throne at the front of the main hall. His tomb was situated on a hill which we had to climb, something that was excruciatingly unpleasant in the hot muggy weather. Le Dai Hanh's temple was just a short walk away and it was decorated with small courtyards and rock gardens, with stately banyans framing many of the temple halls. Behind Le Dai Hanh's temple stood a small and most importantly mildly chilly museum displaying some remnants from the old dynastic capital. There was a fenced-off hole in the floor showcasing an archeological site with some brickwork from what used to be a massive palace, which is pretty much all that's left of the original structure. Outside of the temples there were women aggressively marketing hand fans and hats to people, they came up to us and tried to offer products to alleviate the heat. It was boiling, so my sister actually did buy a hand fan which she used throughout the rest of the holiday.
That night, we visited the largest town in the area, also named Hoa Lu. We entered a janky local restaurant and ordered some bun cha and banh cuon, which came out in no time at all. The local style of bun cha featured cut up blocks of rice vermicelli, which we paired with some herbs and grilled pork and dipped into a zesty sauce. It was good, but we preferred the banh cuon, which used soft flat rice noodles instead and just had a better texture. After that we went for some che, a broad category of Vietnamese coconut milk-based dessert soups - the style we got included large heapings of durian and jellies and it was divine. We also had some durian crepes, which were unbelievably light and fluffy.
The next stop in Hoa Lu was the Ky Lan lake park, a series of walking streets centred around a lake festooned with glowing lanterns. There were many stores in the area selling snacks and paraphernalia, and while it was definitely tourist-oriented we didn't really mind. In the middle of the lake there were a number of modern pagoda-style temples full of intricate relief carvings which were crawling with people, and interestingly enough despite their recentness and lack of traditionality there were many people using them as active religious sites; I saw many locals standing in front of the idols and briefly praying to them. I think this is a fairly fun short excursion in Hoa Lu at night; it's not a main attraction but it's a buzzy and festive part of the town with some pleasant things to see.
We spent our last day at Trang An visiting Bai Dinh Pagoda, one of the most substantial Buddhist temple complexes in Southeast Asia. The old part of the temple is located 800 metres or so from the larger new temple, and features a collection of shrines dating back to the 11th century. The new part of the temple was built in 2003, and boasts multiple records such as the largest gilded bronze Buddha in Asia, the tallest stupa in Asia, the largest arhat corridor in Asia, and so on. It was built in traditional style by artisans from nearby craft villages, and it is gigantic. We travelled around the complex with the help of some electric buses, and it still took us the entire day to explore the whole thing. At some point, we were offered a herbal foot bath, which... involved us soaking our feet in warm herb water for twenty minutes; it did make our feet feel softer though I'm pretty certain the herbs had basically no effect. Probably my favourite part of Bai Dinh was the ancient pagoda towards the back of the complex - we entered the old temple through a gate surrounded by forest and walked up a large flight of stone steps towards two cave temples decorated with a large array of Buddhist statues. One of them contained a subterranean lake surrounded by carvings of dragons and draped cave formations, filled with smoke and incense and wreathed in a warm glow. It was very dreamy, I quite enjoyed my time there.
At this point we were rather templed out, so we returned to our accommodation. Our Grab driver took us past the limestone hills of Trang An one last time, stopping every now and then as cattle crossed the road, and when we got back we boarded a transfer which took us all the way past the centre of Hanoi to Noi Bai airport. We stayed for the night in the airport in a VATC sleep pod which was barely large enough for the two of us, mostly consisting of a bunkbed, a bedside table and an air conditioning unit. Every single time either of us needed to relieve ourselves, we had to take the keycard out of the slot and head to the airport toilets, which cut all power to the sleep pod and meant air conditioning, lights, etc would be shut off for the sibling who remained in the pod while the other was taking a piss. This was not a problem when both of us were awake, since we could leave the keycard in the pod and just knock on the door to get back in, but in the dead of night when everyone was asleep this wasn't a particularly good solution. So the pod would just be left without power, getting hotter and hotter by the second until the other member returned. This was probably the most claustrophobic accommodation we had the entire trip and I'm not sure I fully slept that night.
Phong Nha:
The next morning we boarded a flight to Dong Hoi in central Vietnam, and as soon as we landed we were picked up by a vehicle we'd arranged for beforehand. As we drove out of the city, the narrow strip of coastal plain that characterised most of Central Vietnam gradually gave way to dense, mountainous terrain near the border with Laos; along the way we passed seemingly endless streets lined with worn, crumbling stalls. Eventually our driver pulled into a small cluster of shacks along a tranquil river, framed by towering rainforest-covered peaks. Without a word, he left us there. We were now in Phong Nha, and this was the point when the trip transformed from "extremely fascinating if a bit jarring" into "once-in-a-lifetime experience". This place is one of the highlights not only of Vietnam, but of all of Southeast Asia.
In spite of its isolation, Phong Nha has a very tumultuous history. During the Vietnam War it was a staging point for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply line that kept soldiers supplied with personnel, weapons and food in the US-occupied South Vietnam. Supplies would be stored in the caves of the area and reloaded onto vehicles or bicycles for the trip south below the DMZ; some of them were even used as hospitals, such as Phong Nha Cave which doubled as a hospital and munitions store. PAVN soldiers would spend a few weeks of final training at Phong Nha before heading to the front. Due to its critical nature for the North Vietnamese forces, the US conducted aggressive aerial bombings of the area and defoliated it with tons of Agent Orange so as to strip the trail of natural cover. Hell, it might have even been the most heavily bombed area in the entire country during the war, which is saying something considering just how much damage Vietnam generally suffered. Russia and China only amplified this chaos by supplying anti-aircraft artillery to counteract the American aggression. Unsurprisingly, this area contains some of the highest concentrations of unexploded ordnance in Vietnam.
Just from looking at the town now, one would never guess that anything at all had happened here (unless you wander into places like Bomb Crater Bar, which is exactly what it sounds like). For the most part we found a sleepy, picturesque hamlet with a main street that looked more like a cluster of shacks than any kind of town centre; most of the shops were basically deserted. We spent the first day in Phong Nha doing nothing but hopping between cafes in the area. Our first meal featured coconut coffee, mango smoothies, and tomato tofu, which we devoured at a table overlooking the Son River. As we ate, boats drifted by lazily, dwarfed by the towering mountains on either side. Later, we stopped at a small, tranquil restaurant for cocktails and smoothie bowls. To our surprise, it was run by a Latvian man who handled the bar while his Vietnamese girlfriend handled the kitchen. He was friendly and talkative, sharing stories of his travels through countless countries and his time with a circus, and at some point he opened a bar in this quiet corner of Vietnam. He admitted he wasn’t sure if the business would succeed, since it was still early days.
As we walked through the town, we encountered cattle randomly lazing in the sun and chickens pecking their way through the weeds near the streets. Children returning from school rode home on bikes and waved at us as they passed. Not a single trace of the sheer carnage that transpired here seemed to remain. We slept soundly that night in a small cabin surrounded with the sounds of crickets, rather winded from all the travel we'd done.
The next day, we were picked up from our accommodation by Oxalis Adventures, our adventure tour operator that would bring us deep into the jungles and caves of Phong Nha. In order to even be accepted for the tour, we had to describe our trekking history, send photos of ourselves on a trail as proof of prior trekking experience, provide documentation that showed we were able to run three kilometres in thirty minutes by means of a fitness app, and more. Before going to Vietnam, we were scrambling to buy the required apparel, which included items like quick-dry long-sleeved T-shirts and pants and socks, as well as shoes that would be able to dry out easily once submerged in water (so, no Gore-Tex).
We climbed into their bus, and inside was our Vietnamese tour guide, some safety professionals and six other people who were also going on the tour. They dropped us off at their office, where they ran us over the basics and provided us with backpacks, helmets and water bottles as well as waterproof containers which our phones, power banks, etc were supposed to go into every time there was a wet section. In addition they also provided us with a blue bag where we could place anything we needed for the campsite, so items like extra clothing, toothbrushes and so on would be put inside the bag and left in their office, and porters would separately carry them to the camp for us (we later learned that, before they came to Oxalis, these porters were actually ex-smugglers who transported illicit goods across the Vietnam-Laos border). After the briefing was over, we assembled at the entrance of their office and introduced ourselves to the rest of the group. Everyone there was a couple except for us, and almost everyone (save for one person) was German. I won't share everyone's names, instead I'll refer to them by their jobs - the relevant people involved were Male Statistician and Female Therapist, Male IT Project Manager and Female Art Curator, and finally Male and Female Chemical Biologists. This would be our group for the next two days.
Having completed all the preliminaries, we were then taken deep into the jungles of the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. Our tour guide pointed out various points of interest along the way and told us a bit about the history of the region - according to him, there was a point in time where Phong Nha was bombed for twenty days straight by the US. Later on in the drive he pointed out a barren patch on one of the mountains where an American plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile; it turned out that the plane was full of concentrated Agent Orange and from then on nothing had grown there. He also offered some facts about the ecology and climate of the area, and took some pains to illustrate to us how severe floods were during the wet season - we passed over a huge bridge suspended dozens of metres above the forest floor which he said could get fully submerged at certain points of the year. In addition, he also noted we would not be able to come here on our own without a permit, since the VCP engaged in covert activities within the jungle, the nature of which nobody really seemed to know. Our driver pulled up at an unassuming point on the side of the road, and we grabbed our backpacks and headed into an untamed jungle alongside a tour guide, some safety professionals, and a cadre of ex-smugglers. A jungle that played host to classified Vietnamese government operations and was likely filled to the brim with unexploded ordnance.
The first sections of the trail leading to the mouth of Nuoc Nut Cave were rather leisurely. It was flat and shaded with rainforest, and there were little white butterflies fluttering everywhere along the length of the trail. It looked a bit like a scene from a Disney movie. Our guide stopped at the base of a large trunk he called "sau"; it's a tree in the Dracontomelon genus that produces sour fruit, which the Vietnamese pair with sugar and use in drinks and desserts during summer. I spoke a bit to Male Statistician during this leg of the hike, from whom I solicited opinions on academia, the peer review process and the replication crisis.
After approximately 40 minutes of walking, we made our way across a dry riverbed and climbed around some rocks to reach a gaping cave mouth, with a spread of food laid out on a blanket inside the cavern. We clustered around the blanket to see what they were offering; it was make-your-own spring rolls and banh mi. I took a thin piece of rice paper and stuffed it with herbs and meat and tomatoes, taking care not to overfill, and ate it with some sauce. The group discussed over lunch where they'd come from, where they were going to in Vietnam next, their prior travel experiences before this, and what they did as a job. I liked these people a lot. They were quite an interesting bunch; talking to them didn't make my brain want to shut down like it usually does in group settings where the level of conversation gets dragged down to the lowest common denominator. I felt like pretty much all of them actually touched on topics I wanted to hear about, the conversation at one point even delved into CRISPR-Cas9 and pharmaceutical research because of Male Chemical Biologist.
Once we'd finished eating, we ventured deeper into the cavern. Getting any further than the massive cave mouth required us to crouch down and crawl our way through a relatively tight passage; according to our tour guide you could at one point walk into the cave but floods had clogged the deeper passages with debris over time. The ceiling was covered in small mucus tendrils from predatory larvae, which we were told was a relative of the Australian Arachnocampa glow-worms, except these ones did not emit light. Eventually the passage opened up into a sizeable cavern dominated by rimstone and flowstone formations, and on the ceiling of the cave there was a small opening which only let in a trace amount of light; it had mostly been filled in by rocks ever since its formation. Our guide stated that this might be the original entrance to the cave, since it was the highest known entrance and the cave would have formed from the top down.
We clambered further into the cavern over fairly easy terrain. At one point, we turned off all our headlamps just so we could see how utterly pitch-black the entire cave actually was; it looked the same regardless of whether our eyes were open or closed. Then we progressed to the wet section of the cave, where we moved our phones, chargers, and power banks into the waterproof case, and eased ourselves into the cold water (which was a welcome break from the heat). I braced myself for the shock of submerging my entire body in the water, then proceeded to swim through the dark flooded passage with only my headlamp illuminating the water ahead. There were a couple of these wet sections, they were extremely fun to navigate. I'd never swam in a cave before this, and I can easily say that I would do it again.
Troglofauna seemed to be everywhere in Nuoc Nut Cave. It wasn't just the "glow worms"; cave crickets scuttled under our feet and bats could be found in many chambers. We had been told about a specific cave-dweller that locals called the "Hairy Scary Mary", a species of cave fauna that predated on spiders within the cave and possessed the body of a centipede atop the legs of a spider, and at some point apparently some members of our group did see it. Our guide also pointed out a fern that had been swept into the cave months ago, and in spite of the lack of light or nutrition in the cave it was still green; slowly dying, but somehow still green.
Eventually we reached a remote chamber deep within the cave, where a waterfall cascaded into a secluded pool, and the guide invited us to clamber down the rocks into the water. I removed my slingbag and carefully made my way down, trying not to slip. And... I swam under a cave waterfall. I've travelled through four continents, and out of everything I’ve done in all my years of travel, this moment stands out as the biggest rush I’ve ever experienced.
Somewhat giddily, we climbed out of the pool and ducked into a crawlspace, where we had to crouch down and sometimes pull ourselves through crevices in the rock. This led to the most extensive wet section of the cave yet, which required us to swim against the current of the subterranean river through a series of sinuous passages; we eventually found ourselves in a chamber with a massive vertical opening we would have to climb out of. So we strapped on harnesses, connected it to a rope via carabiners, and began climbing out of the cave on slippery, water-eroded rocks. There were a number of times I almost lost my footing doing this, and I think if we had tried to do it unassisted it would have been a disaster. Even with the security of a harness there was always a way to slip and hit an unprotected part of our heads on a large slab of rock. Worse, there was the lingering fear that we would accidentally disconnect ourselves; we were provided with two carabiners (one red, one black) and we were only supposed to disconnect one at a time when trying to progress to a new section of the rope, but there was a yellow clasp further down the line that could disconnect both carabiners from the harness at once.
Our group pulled ourselves out of the cave and were met with the sight of a campsite. The porters were waiting for us alongside the blue bags we'd left with them, and we quickly stripped off our wet clothes. We enjoyed some tea around a warm fire and made casual conversation as the chefs cooked up some dinner at a portable kitchen, and after our journey the aroma of the food was almost overwhelming. As soon as the dishes were laid out, we crowded around the table and dug in.
After dinner, we returned to the site of the campfire and made conversation until nightfall. These little white butterflies from earlier were absolutely everywhere in the day, but things got even more picturesque once it got dark. Since it was approaching their mating season, fireflies started making their way into our camp, their small flashing lights occasionally zipping through the air around us as we talked and enjoyed platters of peanuts and roasted sweet potatoes around the fire. It was a very cosy experience, surprisingly so considering where we were.
Probably the most interesting campfire stories came from our guide himself, who talked about how Oxalis' tours developed - it seems most of their existing process accreted through trial and error. They originally didn't use to have toilets, rather, they invited visitors to dig a hole in the ground and cover it up once they were done. But Westerners weren't able to Asian-squat, and so they often fell into the hole and ended up sitting in their own poop. In order to rectify this, Oxalis provided sticks that visitors could hammer into the ground so they could hang onto it while squatting, but too often people didn't hammer them in deep enough and the sticks would get yanked out of the ground, which sent them tumbling into the hole anyway. It was a Belgian guy who first proposed that they introduce toilets at their campsites, and he did so because he was sitting in his own shit. He sent them mockups of toilet designs once he was back in Belgium, it appears it haunted him so much he had to rectify the problem no matter what.
The changing rooms were yet another part of the tour they had to iron out early on. Their tours involved a lot of campsites inside dark cave chambers, and so they offered a light for use within their changing rooms. However, it turned out that when they switched on the light their naked silhouette would be visible to everyone. On one particularly memorable trip to Son Doong Cave, there was a woman who turned on a light inside a changing room - one that happened to be situated right in front of a cavern wall, causing a massive silhouette of her body to be projected onto the side of the cave. The second this happened, everybody fell quiet in an instant. Suffice to say that when we were there, they were no longer providing lights.
Our guide also shared stories from his time in Northern Vietnam, particularly around Ha Giang, where he discovered that they eat extremely weird shit. Almost literally shit, in some cases. There's a culture in northern Vietnam, the Nung, that eats half-digested poop cut out of an animal's small intestine. He once ate it unknowingly and noted that it had a bitter taste; after learning what it was, he lost his appetite for days. With a laugh, Female Chemical Biologist joked about how so many of these bizarre tales always seemed to involve things like poop, bodily functions or nudity.
The next day, we changed back into our still-damp clothes and descended through the same narrow opening we had climbed out of the day before, using our harnesses. If anything, going down that infernal fissure was even more difficult than the ascent. It felt far less controlled, since moving with gravity made it easier to lose footing and slip. At long last we all made it back down to the cave floor, and headed into another part of the cave known as Va Cave through a cramped, waterlogged passage. We all stopped to rest in a large room with many flowstone formations draped from the ceiling, with water surging around the small outcrop we were standing on.
Once we had regained our energy we pressed on further into the cave, through waist-deep water and some precarious scrambles. Eventually, we reached an enormous, multi-tiered flowstone formation that seemed to stretch endlessly upward. We were informed that we needed to climb it. So we connected ourselves to the rope provided, and began to precariously scale the formation, which was extremely vertical and offered little in the way of hand- or foot-holds. The most effective method of traversing this formation turned out to be leaning back, letting the rope hold our weight, and carefully shimmying along the slick wall using only our feet. If any of us had accidentally disconnected the carabiners at this point, we would have fallen quite a long distance to the cave floor. After that technical climb we had to undertake an arduous walk on the top of rimstone terraces, which was caked with mud that made it easy to slip.
We made our way to the lip of one of the terraces, and beyond that we could see a surreal forest of ghostly tower cones, each one the size of a human. These formations, by the way, are extremely rare and exist only in two caves in the world (the other one being in Thailand). They're not stalactites and aren't formed by dripping water, and it's not exactly clear how they form - the current working theory is that the standing water within each terrace pool creates small calcite rafts which sink as soon as they become too heavy, and the accretion process over time forms cones about as high as the lip of the pool. Climbing over the lip of the terrace, we found ourselves in the midst of these cones, standing solemnly in the darkness of the cave like a natural terracotta army. Special ladders and metal steps had been placed across the interior of the terrace so as to not disturb the fragile cones, and we followed them to two platforms where we could get a good look at these formations. It is by far one of the most otherworldly things I have ever seen in my life.
At this point we were all exhausted, so we retraced our path to the campsite again, performing three climbs along the way. We ate lunch, then walked back to the bus through a much tougher path through the forest, which involved us scrambling over a hill that seemed more like a tangle of roots and soil - at one point Female Chemical Biologist got a photosensitivity-induced migraine during an aggressively difficult part of the scramble and needed to stop. But eventually we reached the bus which took us back to the Oxalis Adventures office. Every member of the group was granted a medal for finishing the adventure tour (which grants a discount for any other Oxalis tour), and we took a shower at their office so we could scrub off all the muck and grime from our caving expedition. It was from there that we took our transfer to our final location.
Hue:
Our driver continued deep into the night. He dropped us off at an alley where we walked to our homestay, and it was here that we were greeted by a friendly-but-overly-effusive woman behind the counter who gave us some passionfruit juice. She presented us with many maps of Hue and provided a huge number of recommendations on where to go. Initially we thought she might have received commissions from the places she was recommending, but later it became clear she really just wanted us to see her city. We politely nodded at everything, then went to our room (which we had to walk up four flights of stairs to reach) and collapsed.
Hue is a city that has perhaps seen even more carnage than Phong Nha, having been the site of a massacre perpetrated by the Viet Cong and PAVN during the Tet Offensive; 5-10% of the entire population of Hue was killed via methods like torture and entombment, and mass graves continued to be found around the city for years after. It's considered the worst massacre of the Vietnam War, and it happened during a mere four-week period where they occupied the city - it's honestly incredible to me that Hue isn't more of a hellish shithole after an event like that. Central Vietnam has repeatedly been a border zone throughout the country's history and as a result many of the cities and towns there have rather tumultuous stories. It's also a city that experienced an unexpected ascendancy during the late 18th century, becoming the very last imperial capital of Vietnam before the Viet Minh intervened and forced the last emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty to abdicate.
So, some later Vietnamese history: During the 18th century, the Later Le Dynasty was in a tailspin, with the Le kings only holding a ceremonial role. The Trinh lords of the north, who ruled from their capital of Thang Long, and the Nguyen lords of the south, who ruled from Hue, fought for control of the country. These lords were referred to in Vietnam as "Chua"; a title comparable to that of Shogun in Japan, and they played similar roles as de facto ruler of their respective territories. Eventually a peace was brokered between the two families, and a treaty was drawn up formally establishing the Trinh and Nguyen territories... which was broken by the Tay Son peasant revolution. The years leading up to it had been characterised by natural disasters, famines and the collapse of foreign trade, which led to a major social crisis and lots of instability across Dai Viet. The Nguyen lords were forced to abandon some of their southwards expansionary conquests by the Siamese king who launched a war to regain control of Cambodia, and there were several political crises within the Nguyen court during the time as well. Heavy taxes and local corruption during this period spurred three peasant brothers in Central Vietnam to self-style as champions of the people and incite a rebellion against the Nguyen lords. The Trinh saw that the Nguyen were weak, and entered into the affray; it ended with a massacre of the Nguyen lords. One nephew, Nguyen Anh, managed to escape into Siam. The Tay Son then conquered the Trinh, and consolidated their power over all of Vietnam, the capital of the newly unified country now being Hue.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Anh had seen his entire family be killed by the Tay Son and was amassing power in an attempt to reclaim his lands. He rebuilt his support base in the south and befriended a French bishop, Pigneau de Behaine, who believed that supporting Nguyen Anh in his retaliation might help him gain concessions for Catholics in Vietnam and help its expansion in Southeast Asia. Pigneau helped him assemble additional French forces, and Nguyen Anh eventually managed to gain control over Saigon. When the most notable of the Tay Son brothers died, he took advantage of the situation to attack northwards, and gained support from the Qing state (who were reacting to a Tay Son massacre of ethnic Chinese). He quickly conquered all of Vietnam in the early 19th century, overran the Tay Son, and in an act of sweet revenge murdered the surviving Tay Son leadership and their families. Nguyen Anh crowned himself emperor of the newly established Nguyen Dynasty, under the reign name Gia Long, and built a large citadel in Hue on top of the old city used by the Tay Son. As I said, Vietnam gameplay; rice farming. Vietnam lore; basically Game of Thrones.
On our first day in Hue, we made it a priority to visit the city's historic citadel. As our Grab car made its way through the streets, we saw that much of Hue was still enclosed by the original Vauban-style walls and moat (note: apparently this citadel has an absolutely mammoth perimeter of 10 kilometres), with motorcycles and cars having to pass through the original fortress gates in order to gain access to the inside of the citadel. Inside lay the old Imperial City, which we were planning to visit. We stepped out of the car and walked into the grounds of the citadel, where we were greeted by a spectacular gate that marked the entrance to the imperial city. It was called the Ngo Mon, or Meridian Gate, and it was very visually striking; an elaborate red-and-yellow pavilion stood above a series of gigantic stone arches that seemed to tower over virtually everything else in the area. We bought our ticket at a small office just outside of the imperial city, and walked through the imposing gate.
Within the walls of the imperial city lay a stunning palace complex filled with landscaped ponds and frangipanis. We were staring at a courtyard that led straight to the historic Thai Hoa Palace (Throne Palace), considered the pinnacle of Vietnamese imperial architecture. It was a single story building designed in traditional Asian style, boasting a roof adorned with intricate filigreed artwork and finely wrought sculptures of dragons. Inside lay a red-and-gold throne hall, wreathed in endless golden canopies; the walls and pillars were covered with carvings of Vietnamese poetry alongside depictions of dragons and clouds. Hue possesses by far the best historic architecture in the entire country, and the citadel is probably the most recognisable and famous of these sites.
The Imperial City was massive, and we traversed it until we were worn out and couldn't explore anymore. We visited big red temples dedicated to the thirteen emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty, saw elegant rock gardens framed by bonsai and graceful wooden pavilions, and more. There was even an original Vietnamese royal theatre within the complex (Nguyen Dynasty court music is still played there to this day, but unfortunately they weren't performing when we visited the citadel). To the back of the complex stood the reconstructed Kien Trung Palace, a stately palace built in a mix of Vietnamese, French and Italian Renaissance styles. Its overall architectural structure almost looked like something one might find in Europe, except it was covered from top to toe in intricate mosaics in the shape of dragons and other Asian iconography. Much of the architecture in the city does this - it syncretises traditional Vietnamese aesthetics with French elements, and forms quite a unique style I can easily say I've never seen anywhere else.
Outside the city, we grabbed a ridiculously sweet and fresh pineapple on a stick (yet again we were given a spice mixture to dip the pineapple into, this time we opted not to use it) and made our way to the Hue Museum of Royal Antiquities. It featured many artefacts from the Nguyen Dynasty, from ceramics to thrones to artwork. The museum was fairly small and we were absolutely exhausted by this point, so we took a Grab to a restaurant in downtown Hue where we were served some great food. We ordered some bun thit nuong (vermicelli and grilled pork with fish sauce), banh khoai (seafood pancake wraps) as well as banh bot loc (tapioca dumplings) and found them to be very tasty - in general we tended to like Central Vietnamese cuisine far more than we did the food in the North. The North seems to have a tendency to underflavour things, perhaps this fits Western palates more but as Southeast Asians ourselves who are more used to heavily spiced flavour profiles we found it to be a bit plain.
We found walking around Hue a bit more relaxing than Hanoi. There were an unbelievable number of temples in the city, with every street seeming to have at least one, and virtually every dilapidated shack we came across possessed small altars for people to pray to. It's not like there were no jarring parts to it - it was still Vietnam, motorcycles were still common, but the air was much better in this city, and crossing the street was far less hassling (apart from one time we accidentally stumbled into a firework display celebrating the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon; motorcycles were clustered in the street there and it was insane). People also seemed nicer and less cold to us in Central Vietnam in spite of all the shit that had happened to them in recent history, sometimes to the point of being a little overbearing. One thing that didn't change - there were still touts around downtown Hue who would pester us to take their rickshaw rides; it seems this occurs in all of Vietnam. Ignoring them continued to be the best policy.
On our second day in Hue we hit up the mausoleums of the Nguyen Dynasty emperors, situated south of the city centre. The first mausoleum we visited was the Mausoleum of Emperor Tu Duc, the last and longest-reigning pre-colonial emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty. It was built in 1867 and is considered one of the best examples of a royal tomb in Vietnam; it used to be a palatial retreat for the royal family, and its construction required so much corvee labour and extra taxation of the populace that it formented a coup. Upon entering, we were welcomed by a leafy, landscaped pond teeming with koi fish and adorned with many elegant pavilions; I thought this was a very finely wrought garden that rivalled virtually any other in East Asia. Situated up a flight of stairs was a simple temple complex, and to the north of the gardens and temples was the site of the actual mausoleum. This section was the most striking, with a grand stele housed in an ornate pavilion, flanked by statues of mandarins and elephants. Behind the stele stood a gate that marked the entrance to Tu Duc’s tomb where his sarcophagus lay.
Just 11 minutes' walk from the Mausoleum of Emperor Tu Duc was the Mausoleum of Emperor Dong Khanh, which I actually liked even better than Tu Duc's. It was a smaller complex, but it was far less touristed and actually possessed even more spectacular architecture, at least in my estimation. The interior of the Ngung Hy Dien, the main temple hall, was decorated in red and gold architecture similar to that of the Imperial City's throne room - but it also had colourful stained glass windows which filtered all light that entered the temple. The tomb site was incredible as well, featuring many gates and stele pavilions decorated with intricate mosaics. I do think anyone who visits Tu Duc's tomb should also visit Dong Khanh's tomb, I wouldn't recommend doing only one. They're very close together and they complement each other very well.
After visiting both these mausoleums, we were rather fatigued from the perennial heat and humidity in Hue - the city seems to have awfully bad weather even for Vietnamese standards, being deathly hot in the dry season and flooding often in the wet season. So we took a break and ducked into a number of cafes where we grabbed some salt coffee, and visited a restaurant that served us a spread of traditional Hue cuisine; the banh beo (steamed rice cakes with shrimp and crispy pork rind) in particular were amazing. We spooned some fish sauce over it and ate it as is.
The next stop was the Mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, which was the smallest mausoleum we visited that day, but also the most unique and spectacular. It's also by far the most recent of these mausoleums, having been built over a period of 11 years from 1920-1931 by two monarchs that reigned during a period of French indirect rule, and it used modern construction methods to achieve a traditional feel. The architecture is a strange syncretic blend of Vietnamese and French influence that seamlessly incorporates the two styles into something completely unrecognisable, and it is incredible to witness. We pulled up and gawked at the exterior of the tomb, which was a multi-level structure made from darkened, weathered concrete in a surprisingly Gothic manner, but it would only get stranger from here. Once we entered the interior of the tomb we found an explosion of colourful ceramic mosaics and canopies, alongside an impressive painted ceiling featuring iconography of dragons and clouds. In the very centre of the tomb stood a gilt-bronze statue of Khai Dinh, with his actual remains interred eighteen metres below the statue. It's really something. Many of the historic sites in Hue represent the best 19th and early 20th century architecture I've seen anywhere in the world (feudalism lasted for a long time in Vietnam), and if you are ever in the country and are interested in history or architecture at all you can't skip Hue.
Finally, we ended our day at the Mausoleum of Emperor Minh Mang, probably the most accomplished of the Nguyen emperors aside from Gia Long. He expanded Vietnam's borders to its greatest extent in history, annexing large parts of Cambodia and Laos as well as completely extinguishing the southern Champa kingdom (really Vietnam owes much of its current borders to the Nguyen). His mausoleum is probably the most simple and elegant of all of them, with all the monuments aligned on a east-west axis surrounded by large landscaped ponds. There's a lot of finely wrought pavilion architecture in this one that's framed by large frangipani gardens and yawning courtyards, I enjoyed it a lot but unfortunately his actual tomb to the back is blocked off from the public. Still, there's a lot there to chew on.
We were a bit mausoleumed out by then, so on our final proper day in Vietnam we decided to visit some of the traditional garden houses and temples north of the Perfume (Huong) River running through Hue. We took a Grab ride to An Hien Garden House, built in the late 19th century for a daughter of Emperor Duc Duc. The entrance to the garden house featured a small gate that framed an intimate forested path; it led to a tranquil house fronted by a tropical pond covered in water lilies. There was a small Asian orchestra on the site playing traditional Vietnamese music in a pavilion, and we sat and listened to them for as long as they would play - it was a very peaceful vibe. Once they finished their performance, we tipped them and left the garden house for our next destination.
The streets north of the Perfume River are probably the most pleasant part of Hue. As we strolled along the banks of the river, we came across endless temples and garden houses - there is really no shortage of temples in Hue, but even in a place filled to the brim with them this part of the city had a uniquely high concentration of historical and cultural sites. At one point, we saw a small ceramic museum along the road, called the "Huong River Antique Pottery Museum", and decided to pop in. Inside, we saw yet another old garden house adorned by tropical plants, complete with many household Buddhist and ancestral altars. We visited the museum towards the back, and saw lots of small rooms and hallways filled with antique ceramics.
In a gesture of hospitality, we were offered tea and a selection of cookies (apparently all homemade using traditional recipes). The man who operated the pottery museum joined us for a friendly conversation. As it turned out, his grandfather was a mandarin from the Nguyen Dynasty, which explained how he had come to inherit the garden house. The pottery found in the museum had all been dredged up from the depths of the Perfume River, and at some point an archaeologist had visited to date and catalogue all the items they had discovered. We then asked him what he thought the best places to visit in Hue were and what his favourite royal tombs were, and he quickly responded "Gia Long Mausoleum". Now we absolutely had to go there. After enjoying most of the tea and cookies, we got up to head to our next destination. Before we left, he invited us to take the remaining cookies with us for the road.
We walked further west to the next stop: Thien Mu Pagoda. This pagoda, built on a small hill overlooking the Perfume River, actually predates the citadel itself. It was established in 1601, built on the spot where a legend states that a "celestial lady" appeared and asked the local lord to build a pagoda to control underground forces and dominate the region. The most recognisable thing about this temple is the Phuoc Duyen, an imposing 21-metre seven story tower built in the 1800s which we saw as soon as we approached the temple complex. The pagoda also had a pretty stripped-back main hall where a monk was striking a big bronze bowl, juxtaposed against very ornate and lush rock gardens populated with koi. Probably the most unexpected thing we found in the temple was the enshrined car of Thich Quang Duc, the monk who self-immolated in protest of Ngo Dinh Diem's anti-Buddhist policies; it was just sitting there innocuously in a small alcove within the temple.
Our final stop of the whole trip was Gia Long Mausoleum, located in the countryside to the far south of Hue. It was initially built for his first wife Thua Thien, but eventually was expanded after his death to include Gia Long and other family members of his. The complex was huge and rather empty when we visited, and most of it looked like a scene from an impressionist painting - big green rolling hills draped around a landscaped lake, dotted with obelisk-like pillars, monolithic stone monuments and incense-filled shrines. It was a highly surreal place to be; it just did not look real. The tomb that contained Gia Long and his wife featured an absolutely mammoth stone pedestal surrounded by statues and adorned with a whole flight of dragon-lined stairs; walking inside revealed an austere and minimal complex centred around two sarcophagi. This is a very dreamlike place, and would have been even more so if it weren't so hot. I think this is probably my favourite mausoleum alongside Khai Dinh's.
We woke up the next day and went to a small island in the middle of the Perfume River known for com hen (baby clam rice). It was served to us in a dirty shack with plastic chairs and tables that were far too low for comfort, alongside a bowl of clam soup made from the water it was boiled in. The com hen itself was tangy and light, whereas the soup was surprisingly strong and packed a lot of seafood flavour. Good stuff, in my opinion. Once we finished, we made our way to the airport nearby and prepared to fly off from Vietnam. Our flights had been moved around and now we had a very long layover at Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon, so we took the opportunity to try some Southern Vietnamese cuisine. Taking a Grab to the city centre, we tried some Southern Vietnamese banh mi and... yeah, this was it. Much better than the one we had in Northern Vietnam. It was juicier, tastier and displayed a far greater variety of fillings. It was also noticeable how much more modern Saigon seemed compared to the rest of Vietnam, and there was a lot less chaos on the streets, unfortunately we couldn't spend too much time there since we were on a time limit. We returned to our airport, went through customs, and boarded our flight back to Sydney.
Conclusion:
That was a long post, it was probably quite rambly at points, so thanks for sticking through to the end. I'll provide some concluding thoughts here for people who didn't bother to read it all - do I recommend Vietnam? It depends on your level of comfort. If you can tank some overwhelm and discomfort, you'll find a lot to like as long as you are willing to take the good with the bad. Would I travel to Vietnam again? The answer's "absolutely yes, but not soon". Vietnam is a place that boasts a large amount of rich history and culture, as well as some very impressive natural sites that offer many opportunities for once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Hell, even the roughness and the abundant culture shock is an element that gives it its character - it's very fascinating to see a country in the process of transition from a largely agrarian society to industrial modernity, and to see these two worlds rub up against each other in strange ways. But it can also be jarring and overwhelming, and it takes a lot out of you when you travel there. It's a country that doesn't offer a smooth experience and doesn't try to, and in that sense, it's not a manicured tourist trap; it feels like a real, raw place where people live and sleep and shit.
To close off, I'm reminded somewhat of the Fun Scale, a metric developed by the mountain climbing community to describe their trips: Type 1 fun is stuff that's fun in the moment and fun in retrospect, Type 2 fun characterises experiences that are not enjoyable in the moment but are fun to recall afterward, and Type 3 fun is stuff that's not enjoyable at all, not when it's happening and not in retrospect. I feel like in Vietnam, I experienced all of the above at different points on the trip.
You will, however, come away with a fuckton of stories, that's a promise.
Hey folks, there's a space on X where people are doing live reactions for the Starship launch this morning. Come join if you're curious.
The recent conversation on anime inspired me to write this review of the best one I've seen so far, not just in terms of Anime, but truly one of the best written stories I've ever seen. I often thought of it as prophetic, but looking back on it for the Nth time, I think a lot the phenomena and trends it talks about were already underway, they just didn't seem so prominent at the time, and so made a good premise for a fanciful sci-fi show.
Spoilers ahoy, although I'm not going to go beat by beat for each and every episode.
Psycho-Pass is set in a post-cyberpunk future, where Japan developed technology capable of looking into our very souls. Thanks to remote brain scans and big data analysis, a hyper-advanced computer system (often referred to by name as the Sybil System) can guide everything, from individual lives to the sociaty as a collective, towards it's optimal path. Various components of the scan form the titular Psycho-Pass (as in: passport) which determines your standing in society. We mostly see the world through the eyes of Akane Tsunemori, a young police inspector, fresh out of the academy. The first 3 episodes are a sort of "tutorial level" for her, where she learns the ropes of police work, and we get to see the basic mechanics of the Psycho-Pass, and how it affects people.
We meet Akane as she's running late for her first assignment: a normie white collar worker got flagged by a street scanner doing a "hue check" - a low resolution vibe check that gets translated into color for readability. The suspect has been determined to be doing a bit too much wrongthink, and was directed by a drone to go to therapy. Not only did he refuse to comply, he grabbed a passerby, took her for a hostage, and ran off to a ghetto full of the homeless and other undesireables. All of this is explained to us by Akane's work partner, inspector Nobuchika Ginoza. Just as he's done with the briefing, they a see a police van arrive, and the rest of the supporting cast disembarks:
The people you're about to meet cannot be considered humans like us.
Their Crime Coefficients all exceed the safety limit. They are people of bankrupt character.
Normally, they would be completely isolated as latent criminals, but they're allowed into the outside world for the sole purpose of flushing out criminals just like themselves.
They're hunting dogs. They're beasts used to hunt beasts. They're what we call “Enforcers”.
They will be your subordinates.
The Crime Coefficient is another component of the Psycho-Pass that measures an individual's propensity towards crime. It's a high resolution measure, that requires specialized hardware, and significantly more compute than a basic Hue Check, so they are not done routinely. Instead, law enforcement are the only ones handling such scanners, which conveniently come attached to a gun called a Dominator, which make the police work rather simple:
- Anyone with a Crime Coefficient below 100 is considered a law-abiding citizen, and is not a subject for any enforcement action. The trigger locks automatically when the gun is aimed at them.
- Values between 100 and 300 mean that the suspect is considered a "latent criminal", and they should be taken into custody. The gun fires in "paralyzer mode" to help facilitate this.
- Above 300 the suspect is subject to a summary execution, and the Dominator switches to "eliminator mode".
- Independently from the Crime Coefficient, there's also a "decomposer mode", which is activated when law enforcement are facing a significant threat, and really need to blast something to kingdom come.
Perhaps I should have said it's the judicial system's work that has been simplified, rather than that of the police, since the police still have to apprehend (and/or execute) criminals, while the entirety of the due process has been replaced with a Crime Coefficient scan. The system is responsive in some ways, but appears very rigid in others. On one hand, we do see update based on incoming data. When they first try to arrest the suspect, it turns out he took stimulants that countered the paralyzer. That act of defiance cost him is life, as the system responded by authorizing his execution. Similarly the hostage moves up and down the scale. First, the trauma of the entire ordeal makes her Crime Coefficient go up to the point where she's considered a latent criminal, and will placed under arrest. Then, upon witnessing the execution (which is done in a particularly gruesome way for no apparent, or explained in-universe, reason) and thinking she's next, she makes a break for it, which causes the Coefficient to go even higher, now authorizing her to be executed as well. Finally, as the resident naive newbie (and young woman), Akane insists on showing her mercy, successfully talks her down from going out in a blaze of glory, and thus the system updates once more, this time downward, and she's merely arrested.
On the other hand, everyone, with the exception of Akane, is acting like once you pass a certain threshold, your life is over. Before he's killed, the kidnapper has a little "what's the punishment for being late?" monologue explaining his actions:
Up until today, I did everything by the book. I spent my whole life walking on eggshells, trying my hardest not to upset or bother anyone.
And yet, I get flagged by one little detector and boom! They already treat me like I'm a criminal.
This is it for me.
Now that it's come to this, it's all over. I'll never be able to get a job, get married, or anything else.
Well, fine then. I've restrained myself all this time. So now, I'll just do whatever I want. I'll take whatever I want. I'll kill anyone I don't like!
You might think maybe he's just an unstable man, failing to see that the system isn't as rigid as he claims, and his life was never over, but even the hostage thinks she's boned, when she's shown her Psycho-Pass. What's more Akane's decision to go easy on the hostage is portrayed as extremely unorthodox. Everyone treats her like she's crazy, and her actions can only be justified by being naive and inexperienced. She spends a good deal of the second episode fighting doubts about her decision, and trying to justify it in the case report*. Luckily for her the hostage ends up improving after being given therapy in custody, but that outcome is implied to be so rare, that the unorthodox nature of her actions are seen as a plausible explanation for it, so she gets to claim it as a justification.
*) You might be thinking "huh, it's a rather ruthless society, if you have to justify not killing a suspect", but "the decision" in question was less about showing mercy to the hostage, and more about shooting one of the enforcers (in paralyser mode) in order to prevent him from carrying out the execution (only has himself to blame, that's what he told her to do). There's also the "blaze of glory" aspect of the situation, where Akane would be putting herself and her subordinates in danger, if things didn't go her way.
The rigidity isn't even limited to the Crime Coefficient. After the kidnapper has been dealt with, the following day Akane meets up with her friends for coffee, and in the course of the conversation it turns out that in the Psycho-Pass universe, Akane has a super-power - the power of choice. One of the blessings of the Sybil System is it's ability predict how well suited each individual is for a given job, and Akane was found to have (top!) aptitude for jobs at all thirteen ministries and agencies, and six companies. Faced with so much choice, she also faces doubts like "what is my purpose in life?" which everyone else finds extremely annoying. One of her friends does manual labor, and the other is an IT worker, and neither has any prospect of ever doing anything else in their lives. Later on she also has lunch with one of the enforcers - Shusei Kagari - who's situation is even more dire. Enforcers are nothing but convicts with aptitude for police work, and Kagari was declared a latent criminal when he was still a child. His only choice in life was to either rot in prison, or work for the Public Safety Bureau in return for better living conditions, and a sliver of freedom (enforcers can even leave the PSB compund as long as they're accompanied by an inspector).
Another one of Akane's "superpowers" that's briefly mentioned, is that her Psycho-Pass tends be good. Why that is, is initially a matter of some speculation, and finally spelled out in the later episodes, but it seems to boil down to her stoic life philosophy. In any case, she seems to be unaffected even by events that would mess other people right up, while everyone else, who isn't already a latent criminal, goes through life stressing out trying to manage their "Hue". The third episode, possibly the first mission outside of the "tutorial level" explores that - and how it can go horribly wrong - a bit more. Akane's division is assigned to investigate suspicious deaths in a drone factory. Originally all ruled accidental, their mere frequency raised suspicions. No direct evidence of foul play is found, but the investigation reveals disturbing dynamics between the workers. For security reasons the entire factory is completely cut off from the interwebs, and they have to make do with what they have around for entertainment, which is not a lot. So, as is perhaps not uncommon in male-heavy environments, the workers as a group tend to periodically pick a victim and bully the shit out of him to blow off some steam. The director of the factory is aware of this, and allows it, as it's good for collective morale. When any particular worker gets bullied too much, and their Hue gets too messed up, he rotates him out and lets another schmuck take his place. However, no one's been rotated out in quite a while, as the most recent designated whipping boy's Hue seems to periodically recover on it's own... and the times of the recovery are curiously aligned with the times of his coworkers' deaths. Plot twist! Turns out the whipping boy has been blowing off some steam of his own.
One of the fascinating aspects of the show is the blurry line between what is meant to be a statement about the impact of technology on society, and what is an allegory for how society already operates. In interviews the show's creators often hint at most of it being the latter, and it makes sense. Psycho-Pass was written in 2014, AI was still a distant dream, and many technologically mediated social trends it talks about were still in their infancy, if they even can be said to have come about at all. Information revealed in later episodes even makes it clear that the Sybil System isn't exactly an AI in-universe, and shouldn't be interpreted to be about the impact of technology on society, at least not exclusively. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, but for now, since the story is leaning in the AI direction, and since so much progress has been made in the field IRL, it's hard not to dwell on it a little bit.
I've had my fair share of rants about Rationalists and how they get AI wrong, Psycho-Pass is how I think you get it right. Stop worrying about agentic superhuman conscious intelligences, and start worrying about systems for mass surveilence and control. Worry less about existential risks coming from misalignment, and more about existential crises people will face when you sucked all humanity out of their daily lives. Remote brainscans might seem fanciful, but between SocMeds, smart watches, and smartphones, do we even need to scan brains to get something like the Sybil System? China already has their Social Credit System that doesn't seem all that different from Sybil, Europe seems like it would like to have one as well, along with a uniquely identifying digital identity, or a (state manged) digital currency And in case we do need to scan brains to get something like the Psycho-Pass, well it's not entirely out of the question. Every time I rewatch the show I end up thinking it's scary how relevant it is.
The conversation between Akane and her friends always makes me smile, because I had one eerily similar to it ages ago, with an old friend of mine facing a similar choice dillema, who ended up pining for a Sybil System to come into existence! "Wouldn't it be great", she said, "if there was a machine that could tell you what job you'd be good at, and would enjoy doing?". It's another thing that I think we're more likely to get than an AGI, and it's a good question if we really want it. The idea that people prefer to have a "human element" in a system instead of everything being decided by a machine has been a trope in sci-fi for a while, but despite being the resident Luddite, I'm starting to wonder if this is true. We're not even that far up the AI tech-tree, and I'm already hearing "but ChatGPT said..." as an argument enough times to make me want to pull my hair out. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it's healthier for people have such a human element, as demonstrated by the growing collective unhappiness, the more exposed to technology we become.
Other than all the food for thought, the show has some great character development. Since these are the introductory episodes there's not much to write home about yet, but here's the general run-down.
Akane is still inexperienced and is constantly wrecked with doubts, but over the course of the show we see her grow in skill and confidence. A fairly common trope in anime, but depressingly rare in western storytelling, and it ivariably makes me shake my head to think how much drama about Mary Sues we could have been spared if Hollywood copied a few notes from Japan.
Although I haven't mentioned his name yet, the other main protagonist of the show is enforcer Shinya Kogami, the poor bloke that got shot by Akane in episode 1. He's one of these dark and broody types with a quest for vengence, and set up as the counterpart for the story's main villain (to be disclosed). Though the thing I find interesting about him is his skepticism, if not quiet resentment, of the Sybil System, and how he chooses to process it (in contrast to the currently undisclosed villain).
Inspector Ginoza is dark and broody in his own way, and seemingly disdainful of the enforcers (he's the one that delivered the little speech about them not being entirely human), but it turns out his motivations are understandable, and his intentions relatively noble. We get to see some of the setup for his arc in episode 3, as Akane discovers there's some tension between him, and enforcer Tomomi Masaoka, which is apparently a touchy subject for both. It has a very moving resolution by the end of the show, but that's another bridge we'll cross when we get there. As for Masaoka, he's an "old dog" detective, with his own interesting backstory of how he became a latent criminal.
I already mentioned enforcer Kagari, he's more aloof and tends act like a goofball most of the time, but has these nice moments of depth, like his conversation with Akane that I mentioned above.
The final enforcer of the team is Yayoi Kunizuka who... well, doesn't really do that much, but gets a pretty good backstory episode later on. And last but not least is analyst Shion Karanomori a somewhat manic superhacker that supports the team back from HQ.
To be continued...
The next day, we start off with a Yechuan-style breakfast with the party member aunt. I'm not quite sure how to differentiate it from other styles; the food is starting to blur together. Too much new stuff all at once. I don't even crave Western food exactly; what I miss is the Western-style meal structure where I pick personal choices and eat them all myself. This might be less the case if I were more able to participate in conversations. The Chinese style is way more conducive to talking while eating, which is why meals last for at least an hour.
Every meal is a kind of frantic context-switching between grabbing food off the lazy Susan, responding to toasts, and talking with neighbors or the whole group. Somehow, aunties universally find time in this frenzy to insist you eat more, invariably when what's available to grab is jellied duck tongue or intestines. I power through, though. They mean well, and it's more a lack of hunger after spending six hours a day at a meal table than the food being unpalatable. My wife is understandably pretty exhausted, and the translations come less frequently. My sister-in-law is picking up some of the slack.
Next, we stop by the Nanjing Museum. Not too much to say about the museum itself. If you've been to a museum, then you can guess what to expect. My sister-in-law and I got the English digital audio tour, everyone else Chinese. The voice is text-to-speech and quiet but good enough. I use this time to relax a bit; it's been nonstop all week. One thing I'll mention is that mainland Chinese people are comfortable bumping into each other and having very little personal space. The museum is packed, and you'd never get near any exhibit if you weren't comfortable with boxing people in or being boxed in.
After the museum, it's lunch again. This time, the baijiu is a green bean variety. We're seated next to a cousin who was at MIL's grandpa's ceremony. I didn't have an opportunity to talk to him much then. He's a few years older than us. He reportedly was TikTok famous for workout videos and now sells used cars through TikTok. According to him, the Chinese used car market is only about 20 years old, and there are big counterfeit and fraud issues.
After lunch, we head to the Confucius Temple. One shouldn't confuse this with a Confucius temple, which may have something to do with Confucianism. This is a very large shopping and amusement district. Supposedly, at one point, it also contained the red light district. My wife spent the first eight years of her life before moving to the US a few blocks from here. MIL claims she took her through the shopping district every evening to calm her down before bed.
We take a quick detour to Laodongmen, or the Old East Gate, at her parents' insistence. It's much the same market-type district as the Confucius Temple, but the architecture is from the Ming and Qing dynasties, and they go to great lengths to keep it that way. Everything is ornate dark wood or carved stone. The storefronts are impressive, but the merchandise is not very compelling. It's all the same baubles from Yu Gardens, and this is much the same as we get back to the Confucius Temple area.
We run into kids in the same uniform as the top school in China again at the market, furthering doubt that this isn't some universal high school uniform. The party member aunt independently confirms their identity as the number one school. It starts to rain, and there is some confusion about what our actual plan is. The party member aunt has some connections, and it's not clear we've actually paid for any of the attractions we've been to since arriving in Nanjing. We take separate lines, plausibly for lack of Chinese ID.
After the sun sets and some confusion, we end up in a museum dedicated to keju, or the merit-based test originally established during the Sui Dynasty circa 600 AD, which spiritually survives today in the form of the gaokao that consumes the childhoods of many Chinese people. There was a small section dedicated to the military version established a century later, where a man would need to pass several tests, including archery and the ability to deadlift a stone. They had some stone examples available, but to my disappointment, there were no opportunities to try or even a standardized weight listed.
The test apparently was originally a series of essays written over three days. I only got vague answers as to what the actual questions were—something about understanding Confucius' ideas or writing about proper government structures. But when asked how cheating and corruption were combated, answers came readily. Your essay was to be transcribed by an official before being judged to prevent handwriting from being used to allow bribes. It was administered every three years in tiers, starting locally and then finishing in the imperial exam, in which only 300 people got top marks.
FIL answered a question I'm sure many have had: What's up with those weird hats with wings on either side? He claims it's to keep officials from being able to whisper to each other in secret, making it one of the earliest pieces of anti-encryption technology. The Chinese surveillance state has deep roots.
After we finish the exhibit, we go straight to another. This one is a lantern festival at the actual Confucius Temple. My wife's feet are hurting, so she sits down, and I wander about without translation aid. There's not much to say about the lanterns; they're impressive in large numbers but really just paper or cloth over lights—very similar vibes to a Christmas light display.
We don't stay long, and next up is a boat tour on the river. It's nice, and there are some displays about a drunken poet that normally I'd be amused by. There were huge advertisements for some baijiu that nearly entirely obscured one statue of him. But we're a little burnt out on sightseeing at this point. My wife recounts a quote by her mother that after a proper trip, one should collapse in misery at the end of the day, and I'm starting to think she wasn't exaggerating.
The boat tour ends at 10 p.m., and we were told to expect a light dinner. So we spend a mere two hours in a nearby restaurant. No baijiu, fortunately. The next day, her parents are going back to visit both grandmas, giving our generation a free day.
We plan to hike Zijin Mountain, the same one with those mausoleums, with Syracuse and his technically-not-girlfriend. She pulls up in a green Jeep analogue with "TANK" written on the back in block letters. She brought her dog Dan-Dan, or Egg-Egg, a one-year-old English Sheepdog. Despite all these signs, she seems to get along well with our nerdy cousin. The two gifts he got her were makeup, which was a mistake. It's an understandable mistake—girls use a lot of makeup, and it can be expensive. Boys, buying a girl makeup is like her trying to buy you a video game without consulting you or having any idea what makes a game good or in your tastes. Just don't do it. She's merely annoyed with him.
The hike up is relatively uneventful; the path is nearly deserted. Hiking doesn't seem as popular in China as other activities. At the top, we stop for KFC. They have hamburgers and grilled chicken but no actual fried chicken—a sad state of affairs that may have cost them their lives in the States, but it is still crowded. The burgers were... weird, kind of loose and almost wet.
On the hike down, we talk about what to do for the evening. I suggest goinf to a Chinese bar, pub, or basically any Chinese drinking establishment that isn't a club. These are probably not the right people to ask but the suggestion turns into a plan. Syracuse has never seen the inside of a bar anywhere, and his girl acquaintance doesn't seem to understand the question. But nothing else is suggested and no one comes up with anything better.
Dinner is another lazy Susan with Cantonese-style roast duck and a birthday cake for Syracuse, as he'll turn 29 American and 30 Chinese the next day. In China, you come out at one year old. He makes a wish, and the girl says she already knows what it is: to finish his PhD. He comes back with, "That is one of my three wishes." From the reaction, he won the exchange. Chinese people generally think everything in America is too sweet, and their cakes tend to be lighter and covered in fruit.
After dinner, we reiterate anything but a club. We make our way to a place they found online. It's up an elevator, and as soon as we arrive, we confirm that it is indeed a club. Without a reservation, they only have a back table with a 1,500 yuan cover. I might have been willing to eat the cover even though we only planned to be out an hour or two, but even the waitstaff is giving me the stink eye.
We make our exit, and part of me wants to just cut and hang out at the hotel, but they're committed. We end up finding our way to a James Bond-inspired cocktail bar with a vibe that I would describe as schizophrenic. The lights are dim with what seems to be essentially a random playlist of Western songs that go from upbeat country to emo while The Big Bang Theory, subtitled in Chinese, plays on the back wall. Despite the relative clown-show nature of the bar, the bartenders could not be more serious, adopting severe expressions and using exclusively the English names of the cocktails. I don't think it was representative of the Nanjing drinking scene, but I approve of it nonetheless.
After we get into our first round, the mood improves. My wife tells stories of her patients. We find out Chinese working people get practically no paid time off—five days a year to start—but are able to take unpaid time off without too much hassle and have longer holidays.
We have to be up early for our train back to Shanghai the next morning, so we head back to the hotel at midnight. The parents have retrieved a few more gifts for us while we were out. We now have a thick silk quilt with a long list of prohibitions that are surprisingly similar to how one should treat a Mogwai in order to avoid creating a gremlin, along with a number of trinkets and a pair of little red books. I'd have preferred to find them myself but accept the help.
In preparation for reading Trump's executive orders, I started reading Biden's. I think I just finished the backlog.
My goal in this report and subsequent reports is to get at concrete actions that are happening in government, rather than the emotional reactions and grandiose rhetoric on either side of the media. I'm looking for significant actions with long-term consequences which are under-reported along my axis of interests: competence in government, environmental regulation, science funding policy, AI, and other existential threats.
This means I will skip a lot of the rhetoric. If something is very likely to be challenged in court, I will note that and then wait for the courts to have their say.
Outgoing executive actions of the Biden administration
January 14, 2025: Proclamation 10881 "Establishment of the Chuckwalla National Monument"
This Proclamation goes on for five print pages about the history of a region in "southeastern California, where the Mojave and Colorado Deserts intersect," then declares (under the Antiquities Act) that the "objects" described in these pages need to be protected, "to ensure the preservation, restoration, and protection of the objects of scientific and historic interest identified above and to advance renewable energy in Development Focus Areas (DFAs)".
The area to be protected is five claims totaling 624,270 acres, between Joshua Tree National Park and Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range.
I don't know anything about this region, but skipping all the rhetoric, the plain text of the Proclamation doesn't make sense to me. In my mind, either you preserve an area, or you develop it, but not both. Preserving "to advance renewable energy" is weird, unless this is the watershed for a hydroelectric dam.
January 15, 2025: Executive order 14141 "Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure"
This executive order has eleven sections on more than 20 print pages, so I will summarize each section as a unit.
Section one: Preamble: "This order sets our Nation on the path to ensure that future frontier AI can, and will, continue to be built here in the United States."
Section two: Policy: Agencies should support AI development for national security and economic leadership, and energy development for such, as long as it doesn't raise energy prices. (How can using more energy not raise energy prices?)
Section three: Defines terms. Not too many surprises here, except that fossil fuel power with 90% permanent carbon capture falls under the definition of "clean energy."
Section four: (1) Three sites on Federal land will be leased to AI data centers and their supporting energy infrastructure by 2027. This section defines consideration and process for the Secretary of the Interior to do so, announcing sites by March 31, 2025, soliciting bids by June 30, 2025. (2) Five regions will be designated as "geothermal regions" for power generation and "thermal storage." A program for streamlining geothermal projects on federal land will be established by July 2025. (3) Construction of AI infrastructure is to begin by Jan 1, 2026 with full-capacity operation by December 31, 2027. This seems like slow timelines for AI. (4) These sites are to be secured within one year.
Section five: This whole section is about how the DoE should work with states to report on the impact of data centers on consumer energy prices. I predict this will slow AI development.
Section six: Requires electrical transmission providers to let the Federal government know about their remaining and planned capacity, and makes arrangements for agencies to power the three AI data centers of Section four. This is a good thing insofar as it is seeking to find underused infrastructure for placement of data centers. On the other hand, isn't this what price signals are for, and isn't it dangerous to have all this information in a single place which will undoubtedly be hacked by China?
Section seven: Requires agencies to do all the permitting quickly. Ex. EPA review is 30 days.
Section eight: Instructs the Secretary of Energy to include frontier AI data centers in its previously-scheduled nationwide energy and transmission needs analyses. Instructs agencies to who make infrastructure loans to inform the developers who win bids for AI related infrastructure on Federal land about loan and loan guarantee opportunities.
Section nine: (1) Plans to make a plan for promoting development of nuclear power. (2) Mandates a report on supply chain risks for data center components. (3) Develops model contracts for distributed energy. (4) Evaluate existing nationwide permits to see if they can be used for AI data center construction, and write new ones.[?] (5) Hold a voluntary "grand challenge" for power efficiency, computational efficiency, and water efficiency in data centers.
Section ten: Coordinate with geopolitical allies to build "trusted AI infrastructure" abroad.
Section eleven: Don't violate existing laws while doing any of this.
January 15, 2025: Executive order 14142 "Taking Additional Steps With Respect to the Situation in Syria"
This Executive Order (EO) modifies a 2019 (Trump) EO which declared a National Emergency in order to seize assets of individuals who had "directly or indirectly engaged in" "actions or policies that further threaten the peace, security, stability, or territorial integrity of Syria", but limited to "Turkish officials" who had sought to "obstruction, disruption, or prevention of a ceasefire in northern Syria".
Biden's EO strikes language which keeps it narrow to "in particular the recent actions by the Government of Turkey to conduct a military offensive into northeast Syria," and removes all clauses limiting enforcement to representatives of Turkey.
I read this seeking to allow sanctions on non-Turks who threaten the stability of Syria. Maybe Syrians, maybe Isrealis?
January 14, 2025: Notice 2025-01312. "Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to the Situation in the West Bank"
This notice extends the national emergency of a previous executive order for one year, until Feb. 1, 2026. The previous executive order appears to sanction people involved in supporting violence in the West Bank, and prevents them from immigrating from the US. Not sure if it referrs to Israeli settlers or members of the Palestinian Authority.
January 15, 2025: "Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to the Widespread Humanitarian Crisis in Afghanistan and the Potential for a Deepening Economic Collapse in Afghanistan"
The administration issues a declaration to extend a previous national emergency by one year. This national emergency allows freezing the assets of "Da Afghanistan Bank" held by US financial institutions, to keep the Taliban from using these assets.
Given that the asset freeze has been in place since February 11, 2022, this isn't a big deal.
January 16, 2025: Executive Order 14143 "Providing for the Appointment of Alumni of AmeriCorps to the Competitive Service".
This EO gives Americorps alumni with 1700 or more hours of service a fast-track to Federal employment, by making them elligible for "Non-Competitive Eligibility", for one year following their service. This gets them out of merit-based competition in federal hiring. This affects a population of about 80,000 people.
January 16, 2025: Executive Order 14144 "Strengthening and Promoting Innovation in the Nation's Cybersecurity"
This EO has a lot of parts, and each section was likely written by a team of subject-matter experts. There is no way I can do it justice.
Section two requires Federal contract software providers to submit "machine-readable secure software development attestations; high-level artifacts to validate those attestations; and a list of the providers' Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency software customers." It also provides that the government establish "practical and effective" security practices to require when it procures software," and implement "supply chain risk management programs" into their own enterprise software.
Section three requires federal agencies to implement security practices used in industry, then goes into protections (encryption) for the civil space system and space ground systems.
Section four requires "strong identity authentication and encryption using modern, standardized, and commercially available algorithms and protocols", including Border Gateway router security, Route Origin Authorizations, and DNS traffic encryption. I'm skeptical of digital identity documents, but if they were more privacy-preserving than physical documents that would be impressive.
Section five seeks to "Combat cybercrime and fraud" by requiring the implementation and use of "mobile driver's licenses", "remote digital identity verification using digital identity documents" which can be used on any "standards-compliant hardware." The focus seems to be on public benefit programs. Thankfully, there are provisions for "do not enable ... surveil and track presentation of the digital identity document" and "ensuring only the minimum information required for a transaction."
Section six directs DARPA to open a program using AI for cyber defense, and for other agencies to implement the program within a year or so.
Section seven is about making sure that IT systems introduced by agencies can be audited for security compliance. Mostly transparency and automatic attestation.
Section eight is about securing national security systems.
Section nine amends a previous executive order, enabling sanctions on foreign hackers and cybersecurity threatening entities named by the Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary of State.
This is an extremely technical EO, and I have no doubt it was written by several teams of specialists. This also means it is almost impossible for the layperson to evaluate. Implementation will take years, with many sequences of delays built in for agencies to develop and implement processes.
January 16, 2025: Memorandum: "Orderly Implementation of the Air Toxics Standards for Ethylene Oxide Commercial Sterilizers"
Ethylene Oxide is used to sterilize medical devices, but it also known to cause cancer when in the air. This Memorandum establishes a process for considering requests for exemptions to new EPA rules on EtO release.
Whether this is good or bad seems like it will depend on the implementation. The deadline for the process development here is two years.
January 15, 2025: Memorandum: "Extending and Expanding Eligibility for Deferred Enforced Departure for Certain Hong Kong Residents"
"I have determined that it is in the foreign policy interest of the United States to defer for 24 months the removal of any Hong Kong resident, regardless of country of birth, who is present in the United States on the date of this memorandum, except for those [who have returned to the PRC or been convited of crimes.]" This seems like a good thing.
January 19, 2025: Executive Order 14145 "Helping Left-Behind Communities Make a Comeback"
This executive order directs several agencies to coordinate to support local economic development and make it easier to find resources about economic development programs which may be useful to "covered communities", which are defined as "economically distressed" regions, "Community Disaster Resiliency Zones", rural communities, and regions served by existing regional development programs.
This doesn't look controversial at all, unless the communities in question are selected in a partisan manner.
January 19, 2025: Executive Order 14146 "Partial Revocation of Executive Order 13961"
This is a very short but cryptic executive order. "Sections 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 of Executive Order 13961 of December 7, 2020 (Governance and Integration of Federal Mission Resilience), are hereby revoked."
Executive order 13961 is about continuity of the US government during emergencies. Section 1 establishes "the policy of the United States to maintain comprehensive and effective continuity programs that ensure national security and the preservation of government structure under the United States Constitution," and mandates that agencies must be able to continuously perform "National Essential Functions": mostly security, defense, health, and emergency services. Sections 3, 4, 5, and 7 establish a "Federal Mission Resilience Executive Committee".
I'm very confused. It looks like Section 2 (not revoked) defines the Federal Mission Resilience Strategy, and is untouched. So this EO is abolishing an Executive Committee.
While searching around to try to figure out what was going on, my search for Strategy document of Section two revealed a January 20 2025 Trump EO "Organization of the National Security Council and Subcommittees" which defines a National Security Council.
I'm going to guess this was some kind of parting shot by the Biden Admin, and it doesn't really matter because Trump's day 1 EOs overwrote it. But this last one leaves me just very very confused.
Good morning everyone, I am once again returning to Hem and Haw about something I care about. In last months episode, I told you all to be like Davy Crockett. [https://www.themotte.org/post/1635/why-you-should-shoot-black-powder] In today's installment, I am going to do what my friends call "Clocking in as the VP of Finance" for Major League Baseball. We say this because we all love to moan and complain about what we would do to change the game like we are on the board of directors, even though we do not have any power to do so. I have loved the game of baseball since I was a small boy. I still play now as an adult - albeit poorly - but as long as I can, I always will. I am hoping in the next few minutes I can mostly get you to agree with the following opinions:
The Mound should be moved back
Strikeouts do suck actually
A return of .300+ hitters would be a good thing for baseball
Baseball traditionally hates change. Since the very beginning, people have fought, bitched, moaned, complained, and damned every single change to the game. Candy Cummings invented the Curveball throwing Oyster Shells with his friends down at the docks; hitters demanded its ban. Billy Hamilton reading the rulebook one night realized the ball was always in play and the next day simply ran to second base while the pitcher stood on the mound; people laughed and told him to return to first. Black men were told they simply could not cut it for years and years, now they occupy Cooperstown just like those from all other walks of life. My point being every time the game has a change proposed to it that ends up becoming something we can't imagine the game without, we still end up fighting it for years.
Bill James is a very smart man, I do not think anyone can discredit him for that. He came up with a very visionary system in the mid 1970's called Sabermetrics that challenged traditional baseball thinking to its core. Basically the tenets of his idea are that all points of the game of baseball can be quantified and an optimal strategy can be made to get a team to win games. His argument comes down to outs, outs are what is valuable in a game and it does not really matter how they are made as long as they are held onto for dear life. For years this idea was ignored. Of course there are ways an out matters! People would say putting the ball in play is all that matters - swing and put it in play. If you played baseball as a kid, you probably remember being taught that Striking out was basically the worst thing you could do. Central to Bill James' idea is that this is simply not true. It took a while, but about 25 years after He started writing about this, Major League Baseball was forced to take notice after the Oakland A's put this idea into practice and made a winning ballclub. I do think that the logic of get on base any way you can makes sense and it has been proven that it can win ballgames, but it has also created a brand of baseball that is just flat out boring to watch.
With the addition of Sabermetrics to baseball Professional players are being taught now that strikeouts don't matter, Walks are very important, hitting the ball hard if you do swing is all that matters. This has lead to a rise in what are called "Three true outcome" hitters. If you liked baseball as a kid but now think it is rather boring it is probably because you dislike these without realizing it. The three true outcomes are Walk, Strikeout, and Homerun. In the 1970s it was very rare to see a player like this; Dave Kingman is an example: Huge power, bad average. They were the exception, but now they have become the rule. It is normal, if not totally expected, for a player to hit .240 with 15 home runs a season now with 150+ strikeouts. If you go over baseball stats you will find dozens of guys just like this. Personally, I think this should go the way of the Dodo. You can't make them unlearn an idea obviously though so how do you go about fixing this? This is where my argument for the mound moving back comes from.
Recently there have been other changes to the game. If you have not watched in a while you may be surprised by the speed of a game now; they are about 50 mins shorter than before that's to the addition of a pitch clock. I am a true believer of the pitch clock. Some say that it has ruined the game (see above to see what people used to say) but in reality it is a return to normalcy. Over the last 30 years or so, another revelation a lot of clubs had was that with no clock there was nothing stopping the hitter or pitcher from setting the pace. This lead to players doing all sorts of things between pitches - nut scratch, play with batting gloves, walk in a circle - really just brutal to watch as a fan. I am so glad this is dead and buried - good riddance!
OK so I have covered a little prehistory and now you are up to speed as to why we are where we are today. Let's talk about why I think moving the mound back is a good idea.
Pitching has gotten more powerful as the years have gone by but especially so in the last 15 years. Pitchers are bigger and stronger than before. In the early days of baseball they had almost the same exact problem we have today. Pitchers threw underhand out of a box 50 feet from the plate, but in 1884 due to increasing pressure overhand pitching as you know it today was made legal. What basically happened was overnight the Pitcher went from an irrelevant part of the game to the most important man on the Diamond. If you want to see an example of how dramatic of a change this was let's look at a player and see how his numbers changed. Charlie Sweeney in 1883 (last underhand year) had a 3.13 ERA with 48 Strikeouts in 140-odd innings pitched - honestly, not bad numbers. In 1884 Charlie Sweeney had a 1.70 ERA with 337 Strikeouts in a little under 500 Innings pitched. He also set a record 19 strikeouts in a game that stood for over 100 years until it was beaten by Roger Clemens. Pitchers were simply outmatching all hitters they faced and in 1893 to help deal with this the mound was moved back 10 feet 6 inches to where it is today to give hitters a better chance; just a little more time to see the ball.
So ok yeah sure I know you are saying "these guys also fought at the battle of Gettysburg for spring training how hard could they have really been throwing?" Well the short answer is: we really don't know. The long answer is, probably about what you would see today at your local Varsity Highschool baseball game; right around the Mid 80s. This was probably true up through about the 1950s. Pitchers that were truly great threw in the 90s, even 100s, way back in the 1920s. Walter Johnson was measured throwing about 95; so was Bob Feller, and we all know about Nolan Ryan. So since the early days pitching was pretty constant and for years it stayed that way. But since about 2005 speeds have creeped and now the average fastball is about 94MPH. I think this tied in with our previous discussion about three true outcome hitters has created a perfect storm.
I think it is time we move the mound back another 10 feet, with the speeds pitchers are touching now these days it is to the point I think hitters are simply outmatched. We have been trending this way for the better part of 70 years, there has not been a .400 hitter since Ted Williams in 1941 and I don't think its because hitters are simply worse than he was; I think it is just because our players are starting to outgrow the confines of their current field. so lets go over some pro's and con's of what moving the mound back would do:
Wouldn't this just kill pitchers' fastballs and make every game a hit-a-thon?
I think this will definitely take some zip out of peoples fastballs sure, but you also have to think a pitchers big hammer curve will also then have another 10 feet to break. Think of how much more breaking stuff will be effective! I think it will let the pros get an extra half second to see and swing at a ball helping hitters sure but also probably working in favor of "stuff guys" as well giving them more real estate to work with. I think the cream always rises to the top and the best pitchers will still be the best pitchers, same with the hitters. I think this will just make offense a more common occurrence. Plus think if Vlad Guerrero Jr can hit .323 with 30 home runs while seeing 100 mph from 60 feet imagine what he could do from 70.
So Pitchers will stop striking guys out all the time?
Ideally, yes this is what moving the mound back should do. A return to the offense of the 1920s-1960s: stolen bases, high averages, this was a time when baseball players were household names. In fact, I bet if you asked a random person on the street they could probably name you one from that 40 years faster than they could one guy today.
Would this lead to more injuries?
This was the argument made as well for keeping the clock out but there has not been an uptick and everyone is still playing just fine.
All in all I will always love this game but I think it might be time to really think about addressing this and maybe making a step forward by taking about 10 steps back, also to this point if you are a I miss steroids guy im telling you man you don't miss steroids you miss offense!
About a month ago, as I was browsing twitter, I stumbled upon the following article by Cathy Young:
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-making-of-the-maga-hoax-about
At the time, talk about pet-eating Haitian immigrants was all over twitter. Donald Trump had just referenced it in the latest presidential debate, and his his running mate, J.D. Vance had tweeted about it. It was fascinating how the story played out. Every day, I would see a new story that supposedly validated the claim. Also every day, I would find that an earlier story had been debunked. Either it wasn’t about a Hatian, wasn’t about an immigrant, wasn’t in Springfield, or wasn’t about a pet getting eaten. The article seemed like it would be an interesting read.
Early on in the article, I came across the following paragraph:
It started with an X hatefest I happened to catch at the outset. On Sept. 7, a full three days before the debate, I saw left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon Naomi Wolf share a post from misinformation superspreader End Wokeness (an account that may be run by far-right troll and Pizzagater Jack Posobiec), containing what seemed like an obviously made-up story: “ducks and pets” in Springfield, Ohio being gobbled up by Haitian migrants. The evidence: an anonymized Facebook post about a “neighbor’s friend’s daughter” who had seen her lost cat being carved up by the Haitians next door. I decided to post a sarcastic comment, unaware that I was wading into a dumpster fire.
Nothing about this paragraph is factually incorrect as far as I know, but something in there caught my eye: “Misinformation superspreader End Wokeness”
I am familiar with the End Wokeness twitter account. They’re pretty prominent on twitter, and they are not exactly what I would call trustworthy. I can understand why they might be described as an misinformation superspreader. That characterization isn’t entirely wrong, but even so, it put me on alert.
I think what I’m sensitive to is the way this pattern judges a thing at the same time it’s introduced. It wants me to make up my mind about who End Wokeness is before I’ve had the chance to evaluate them and come to my own conclusion.
When I see that pattern, it always puts me on alert. I’m so sensitive to it, that it sticks out like a sore thumb even in articles that I’m predisposed to agree with (like this one). “Misinformation superspreader” isn’t the only example of it here; “hatefest” “left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon” and “far-right troll” are all examples of this pattern.
Furthermore, it’s trying to persuade me of something without being an actual argument. It’s like when a movie plays sinister music just to let me know that a character supposed to be bad. If I didn’t already know who End Wokeness was, I shouldn’t just take Cathy’s word for it that they’re a misinformation superspreader. Any writer can introduce someone with whatever label they want to, regardless of whether or not it’s accurate.
It also indicates bias. It makes Cathy seem predisposed to be against them. With an introduction like that, it seem unlikely that she would give them a fair shake. It may be that they don’t deserve a fair shake, but I still need to get my bearings as a reader. I can’t always be expected to already know who they are, and I need a way to validate their trustworthiness for myself.
Right-wing publications do this too. I think that Cathy herself would be sensitive to it in these cases. Take this passage for instance:
Just when you think the barrel-bottom standards at Politico cannot get any more bottomer or barreler, the disgraced outlet publishes talking points from a man who is not only facing murder charges, but who is alleged to have tried to commit one of the worst crimes imaginable: assassinating an individual who represents the will, hope, and future of tens of millions of Americans — and I would say the same about Kamala Harris had she been a target.
Does that seem like a reliable narrator to you? Do you think they’ll accurately present what the Politico really said? I know I wouldn’t trust them after reading the above paragraph. You can read the full article here.
I’m sure this sort priming is persuasive to some people. That’s probably why It’s so common. Still, it makes me feel skeptical, and I think for good reason. When I get skeptical like this, I’ll occasionally have the patience to go thorough the article, validating and double-checking the whole way through. Most of the time, however, I’m not that motivated, and I will probably decide the article isn’t worth engaging with.
This is a phenomenon I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I don’t have anything against Cathy young, but when I read the article, the pattern really just jumped out at me, and it seemed like a good anchor point for this article. It’s an even more interesting case due to the fact that it’s an article that I essentially agree with, which means my aversion to it was pure sensitivity to the pattern, and not bias against the content itself.
When we talk the serious conspiracies, those that pass the schizoabsurd, lizardman-constant filter, so skepticism toward the official accounts of certain pivotal events, a common wisdom is quickly invoked: It would take too many people, and someone would talk.
Would they?
On March 8, 1971, Smokin' Joe Frazier fought Muhammad Ali in the Fight of the Century. Both were undefeated -- 26-0 with 23 knockouts for Frazier, 31-0 with 25 knockouts for Ali. Past the biggest fight, it was considered the biggest sporting event ever up to that point. Madison Square Garden made a million at the gate; 2.5 million tickets were sold for closed-circuit pay-per-view venues; in London where it was broadcast at midnight, 90,000 tickets were sold. They went 15 rounds and Smokin' Joe won by unanimous decision, though Ali would go on to the win their next two bouts. While everyone was watching that fight, less than 100 miles away 8 members of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Bureau office in a Philadelphia suburb called Media. The documents they found revealed the existence of the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program: COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO started in 1956, its stated goal was undermining communist activity in the United States and much can be said on that, but I think most relevant is socialism and communism already had a popularity in the States at the turn of the century and after World War 1 and the Russian Revolution they had a real presence in American academia. I doubt a man so circumspect as J. Edgar Hoover was unaware of decades of fomenting communist thought and the subsequent infiltration into power of white communists. I imagine his black book had quite a few names Joseph McCarthy would have been very interested in seeing. Nevertheless, it went on, COINTELPRO worked against the Communist Party of the US, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panthers, and also the KKK. "Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally." MLK arrived and Hoover quickly identified him and singled him out, bugging his home and hotel rooms, and then using the audio from the bugs to threaten King, saying he should kill himself. I have a singular hatred for communism and MLK was a socialist but he had committed no crime, there was no legal basis for the FBI's considerable efforts against him. RFK signed off on a month of watching MLK, Hoover just kept it running.
On the militant side, COINTELPRO efforts, if not wholly responsible for the schism in the Nation of Islam that saw Malcolm X break away, sharply accelerated the deterioration of the relationship between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad that culminated in NOI members killing Malcolm.
As an aside, the FBI was apparently concerned with and dedicated to preventing the rise of a "Messiah-like figure" who would unify black militants. I find this curious. At the time the demographics of the US were 88% white, 10% black, 4% hispanics of any race, those are stark lines. Had there been black militancy and an actual armed conflict, they would have been put down hard and America of the 60s, certainly the South as popularly portrayed, surely had the racial animus to back mass expulsion or if not that, death squads. Right? Hoover was no integrationist. I notice I'm confused. Alas.
For these, for the buggings, for the creation of inflammatory documents, we have an FBI that had no problem serially and severely breaking the law, at stoking hostilities, overlooking murders they effectually encouraged, and with MLK, just outright telling the guy "kill yourself or else." They didn't bother with that for Fred Hampton, they just had him killed. Maybe this seems tame now, my how we've fallen.
The CIA had something of their own version of COINTELPRO established under LBJ and expanded by Nixon, Operation MHCHAOS. They also had something older and in the same window as COINTELPRO: Project MKUltra. "MK" from the internal staff rating, the CIA's version of military MOS, involved in the project, and "Ultra" likely from the extremely high secrecy around the project. I expect most here have the gist: starting in the 50s, the CIA dosed the unknowing with various psychoactive substances alongside research into brainwashing, psychological torture and general manipulation of thought. MKUltra was the successor to the CIA's Project Artichoke, which was itself likely a successor to Nazi research from scientists procured through Operation Paperclip. What we know is horrifying, and we don't know a lot, because amidst Watergate, CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MKUltra files. A small number survived. What brought it to light wasn't even anything out of the project itself, it was Seymour Hersh reporting on MHCHAOS in the New York Times. His piece resulted in the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, and it was under those the existence of MKUltra was revealed.
Ted Kennedy, on the Senate floor in 1977:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations."
Hundreds at least, maybe thousands of people were involved in MKUltra, and with universities performing tests on unwitting citizens it seems like it wasn't particularly compartmentalized. What brought it to light? It wasn't people on the inside blowing the whistle in the 50s or 60s or at the start of the 70s, and I doubt Helms was the only one who thought the American people wouldn't like the truth.
There's Iran-Contra. Oliver North & co. selling guns to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua: busted by an Iranian official leaking to Lebanese journalists. There's the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking, something they've covered their tracks on well, "They knew it was happening" is good enough. There's also Operation Fast and Furious, though I wouldn't group it with the rest, it had interesting goals that might have worked, and those cartel guys don't really have problems getting guns so I don't see FF guns being found at shootings as the biggest pie on their face. But it's worth including because there were people within who objected and blew the whistle.
Then there's PRISM. You know it, Edward Snowden saw the NSA's backdoor to all internet communications, got the files to prove it, now he's a Russian citizen. PRISM is still around, it hasn't been reduced. They can still surveil whomever FISA says they can. The USA FREEDOM Act, the only attempt to limit its reach, moved data holding to the phone carriers; US citizen data of which the NSA can still access with ex parte FISC warrants, an entirely separate incredibly troublesome practice of the US government. PRISM is COINTELPRO and MHCHAOS in one, supersized, a dossier at a click for just about anyone, anywhere. It ranks among the very worst things done by the American government and nobody involved has said a fucking word except Edward Snowden.
What's the common factor?
In each scandal we have large numbers of people involved in such operations. In each scandal, save the exception that proves the rule, none of them came forward. Discovery happened by a lucky break-in, or investigation into a different debacle, or adversarial geopolitical interest.
A CIA official who knows his history knows they don't get caught because someone on the inside spills the beans. They get caught by leaving breadcrumbs for outside eyes. No breadcrumbs, no scandal.
There are smaller scandals, in terms of scope or gravity, not necessarily the height of office of those involved, where whistleblowers did come forward. It's not unheard of. But this is an evidenced rejection of the common wisdom that there is a limited and small number of people who can be involved in highly illegal and evil projects before someone says something. So: "It'd take too many people, and they'd talk"? No, sometimes they don't. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of people can scrape the abyss and go to their graves saying nothing.
This is effectively a reply to @Corvos at https://www.themotte.org/post/1829/tinker-tuesday-for-april-8-2025/316753?context=8#context , but I invite anyone to discuss the topic.
Ask me anything. I love talking about this subject but rarely have the opportunity.
How long ago did you get started?
I started in 2013, and was very active until the lockdown and my subsequent life changes put me out of commission. When I started out, it was basically five core guys reading a medieval manuscript in a university hallway and trying to do what it said with nylon swords. By 2020, we were one of Germany's top clubs, with dozens of members, a proper gym, several courses and a very good tournament track record. I was mostly just along for the ride while others did the heavy lifting, though I like to think that I contributed to that growth, a little. The club, while occasionally dabbling in other weapons systems (dagger, sickle, half-pike, sword and buckler) and eventually establishing a recurring grappling class and a permanent rapier class, mostly teaches longsword, and that mostly based on the Liechtenauer system as documented by Peter von Danzig. We occasionally took a look at other styles as well, but mostly stuck to this, though in latter years the focus transitioned from historical reconstruction to maximizing tournament-effectiveness. I don't have as much as insight into what happened since 2020, or rather since the lockdowns were lifted, but from the looks of it it's been going steady since. If anything the mood seems a little worse than it used to; I feel there's not as much of outright joy and camraderie on display as used to be, but that might just be my own grumpiness coloring my perception. Nowadays I very rarely make it to regular practice, low single-digits per year, since it's an almost 2h drive both ways, and the practice sessions are late in the evening and I'm more of an early bird. Weekend events are more convenient, but somehow there are fewer instructive events than there used to be in my larger area. Tournaments still exist though, and I do like those. I'm just entirely out of shape, and growing old, on top of never having been all that good to begin with.
What do you practice?
Mostly longsword. I tried to get more into rapier, which is reportedly the preferred weapon for old men, but one lucky day I managed to break my thumb and my rapier and since then that's been on ice. The rapier-fencing, I mean - the thumb is fine by now. I used to just do absolutely everything and had lots of fun, but that's just not possible with my severely reduced practice time, so by now it's all longsword. Obviously I started out with the formally correct Liechtenauer style the club in general leaned on, learning the correct stances, master-strikes, infighting techniques, and I think I can say I achieved an acceptable level of technical proficiency across a wide spectrum of skills, though I never quite built up the physical fitness to leverage them properly.
Liechtenauer, compared to Meyer, the style we most love to disrespect, is less flashy and more energy-efficient, and relies more on geometry and less on psychology. You learn a handful master-strikes that efficiently threaten or hit the enemy while preventing him from striking you directly, and the rest is mostly learning which of those techniques to use in a given situation. You can even condense it down further; one very successful fencer (top 5 globally at the time) once told me that he pretty much just practices one strike and one thrust and applying those skillfully enough covers all his needs. So as long as you can avoid becoming too predictable, I think you needn't stress yourself about obtaining an encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of highly situational techniques with hard-to-memorize German names.
Nowadays, being a lot weaker yet and having unreliable knees and a propensity for injury on top, I try to compensate for my physical inadequacy with a more defensive style: Always keep the sword between me and my opponent, keep the range open, use strikes very sparingly and try to go for thrusts from the bind instead. I like to fight from the left, point forward, which takes several powerful striking options off the table for my opponent, so that they have a harder time just battering through my guard. And defensively that works; I can often work out an opening...but fail to exploit it because I lack the explosiveness to generate forward momentum on demand. Something to work on; just plain physical exercise would do me good.
Any tips/advice?
The following will be colored by my tournament-centric view. Obviously it's also possible to just enjoy the archaeological aspects, or the methodical technical exercise, but I mostly speak as someone who wants to go to tournaments and perform as well as possible.
In no particular order:
- Ignore any clubs or schools that don't have their people go to tournaments.
- Gear is expensive. If your club doesn't have any to borrow, you'll be looking at 500€-1000€ for a set of protective equipment and a Federschwert (steel practice sword). When you get a sword, make sure it suits your build - not too short, not too long - and that it complies with your regional tournament regulations.
- Dry technical practice and instruction are valuable for learning the basics. Don't ignore it early on, you need to get the foundational knowledge, skills and vocabulary from somewhere. But over time it will become less important, as you need to find your own way.
- Outright drill - repeating the same motions over and over - is great for increasing the quickness and reliability with which you deliver a specific technique, but it's effectively an isolation exercise and should not occupy the majority of your practice time.
- On the other hand, don't neglect relaxed, playful sparring. At 100% pressure, you'll stick to what you know. With less pressure, you can experiment. It pays to spend some time trying new things.
- Throw yourself into sparring fights and then tournaments as early as possible. Don't get stuck in endless dry practice sessions thinking you aren't good enough. You never will be, if you don't go out and get your mistakes highlighted by adversarial competition.
- HEMA is overall very woke. Ignore it though - it's superficial. Once you get into the competitive scene, nobody takes that seriously anymore. And have a laugh whenever women go into mixed-gender tournaments. Hell, let me tell you about the one time I fought a pregnant woman...
- Everyone fights differently. There is no standard HEMA fighter, not even within clubs or schools, and there is no singular example to aspire to. You too will need to find ways of fighting that suit your personality, build, weapon of choice, the opponent you face, and whatever other factors come into play.
- Don't waste your practice time chatting. If you need information, then get it and immediately get back to practice. There will be social events at other times.
- That said, talk to more experienced people, as often as possible before and after practice. Don't stick to the kiddie pool, get with the big boys. There's too much ignorant pseudobabble at the entry level.
- Most beginners quit. It's normal. Don't assume that this reflects poorly on a club.
- If your club isn't a commercial school, take over responsibilities to keep it running as soon as possible. Somebody's got to do it.
- Visit other clubs as often as you can. Swim in as many different kinds of water as possible.
- More practice, no matter whether technical, drill, sparring or competition, is always better. The more you do, the better you'll get. Take every opportunity you can.
- When you get hurt in a fight, fight on if you can by any means. If you aren't used to getting repeatedly bruised and battered, any injury will feel much worse than it is.
- The judge is always right. Make your peace with it.
- There is no substitute for physical fitness.
The website is a user-friendly proxy for youtube - if it has trouble loading the video, there's a link to the youtube page (or just edit the url).
You may have read things like Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA, but what about a hand tool with no electronics, just a few materials, large tolerances, and a simple assembly process? The same problem of manufacturing engineering being exported for greater integration with manufacturing labor applies to that, too - according to this, American "tool and die" capabilities for small-scale manufacturing are gutted. (I suspect the this video overstates the problem, because the biggest obstacle came when the non-manufacturing engineer with a small budget wanted to contract out a specific need - molds for plastic injection molding, which the molder would have sourced from the PRC - and two other engineers lent their expertise for two different ways of manufacturing plastic injection molds, and he found a mold-maker, after he needed to change the material of a part, but it's still a big deal that there aren't more American vendors advertising these capabilities.) And the video didn't even touch the materials supply chain...
(The completed grill scrubber was priced at $75 and the initial batch sold out within hours, in case you were wondering.)
If you haven't read things like that Forbes series, you might not fully appreciate that it's very easy to have a false perception of what the manufacturing capabilities of other countries are, due to selection bias in exports; there's often a wide variety in the quality of goods produced in a given country and only a narrow range of quality that's economical for you to import. One famous example is the brand images of German cars in America, which only imports expensive German cars. Less famously, there's been a secular trend of American imports of Japanese musical instruments going from the bottom to the top of the Japanese (followed by other Asian countries') production ranges and many American musicians assume each decade's imports were a representative sample. But, since manufacturing labels reflect final assembly, increasingly complicated supply chains are mostly invisible to the consumer. It'd be interesting to know what this partnership would have done differently, if they had expanded their searches to Mexican and Canadian suppliers as an acceptable alternative to American suppliers (as a larger-scale business intent on "friend/near-shoring" would), but the value of purism vs general applicability is a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" type thing.
As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.
(Hopefully that's enough of a conversation-starter, without crossing into CW!)
We arrive at Slender West Lake. It's a kind of garden carefully designed so that every few steps there is a scenic vista. The story goes that the park was owned or managed or something by a salt merchant and the park was visited by the emperor. The emperor liked the park but commented it would be better if he could see the White Tower from within it. The white tower is a famous tower in Beijing. Over the next night, the salt merchant had a miniature white tower constructed out of salt to the delight of the emperor. It was later reconstructed with proper materials. Pillars of salt are poor choices for long-term construction, as Coldplay once noted in their seminal work, "Viva la Vida." The emperor in question was Qianlong, known for having the largest harem and nearly the longest reign. He would have had the longest reign had he not resigned and passed on the post in order not to take the title from his grandfather, whom he respected.
The park is quite nice and seems unknown or unreachable by Western tourists, as I saw zero non-Chinese people. At first, I was surprised to see so many women in traditional garb getting their pictures taken until we passed the shop renting out the outfits and selling photo shoots.
The other ubiquitous guests were many groups of around 20 high school-aged kids in matching tracksuits. These were the school uniforms of what I was informed was the top high school in all of China. A field trip. I'm a little skeptical of the claim, but the others insisted it was true that the school in question had the highest standardized test scores in the country. Top school or not, the kids were all over the park. Later, each group had a large sheet of paper and seemed to be doing a collaborative watercoloring assignment.
We brought MIL's grandmother along and borrowed a wheelchair where able. There is no Chinese with Disabilities Act, and nearly nothing is designed to accommodate wheelchairs. Many places, especially historical places, have a practice where thresholds are intentionally about a foot off the ground. It's bad luck to step on the elevated threshold, as one should get over and not dwell on their problems, or something. If possible, one should avoid being disabled in China.
Fortunately, Grandmother can handle even stairs on foot given a little help, so we could navigate her around the park well enough. There's a steep and narrow bridge called the 24 Bridge because it has 24 posts and 24 maidens danced on it or something; also, it's 24 meters long. I'm not totally sure this wasn't all made up on the spot, but it's definitely called the 24 Bridge. That was on a sign in English, so it must be the case. We got Grandmother to the top of this bridge, which is maybe 2 meters wide and flat for a meter. Of course, we need to take a picture here on this high-traffic bridge. Somehow, the people around us accommodate this madness, and we get the shot.
MIL has a kind of insistent energy when traveling that drives my wife a little crazy in too high of doses. She likes to maximize every moment of a trip. Take a picture here, move on to the next place to take a picture, repeat. Even resting is done in a kind of purposeful way, explicitly to prepare for the next action. I have a rather opposite approach but appreciate that with her, we cover a lot more ground.
The sun goes down as we reach the end of the park, and it's time to head to dinner. Today is the simplest meal yet. We stop by Grandma's apartment and drop off my sister-in-law, who has a headache, and then just walk around the block, past a small group of locals just hanging out and a new conveniently located grocery store, to a hole-in-the-wall that looked from the outside as much like a restaurant as a crafts space. The walls were plain, and supplies were stored next to the tables. It's just the four of us; Grandma and Uncle left. I'm not sure how ordering worked; we're the only ones in the place, and they just start bringing out dishes to place on the lazy Susan.
If my wife wrote this, the log out would be about 60% descriptions of food. I'd write more about it, but the descriptions themselves are fairly vague. There were meatballs in a kind of brothy soup, fish in a sauce covered in a local corn, the good kind of intestines (my wife has strong feelings on this subject), the standard Chinese chicken where the meat is cut such that you must fight and nibble around bones for every bite, along with a few local vegetable dishes.
I grew up a picky eater but have gradually overcome that status and have resolved to eat almost anything my wife eats on this trip. Still, when I plucked the chicken head from the plate, I passed it over to her; she appreciates it more than I possibly can. Willingness to try anything had garnered me some goodwill among the extended family. I even tried "stinky tofu" at the FIL's grandma's place that even my wife didn't eat. I don't recommend it; it may actually be a prank, like when someone from Chicago convinces an out-of-towner to drink Malört. If it was, then they were committed to the bit, going back in for seconds. Then again, some of my city fellows swear by the terrible liquor. FIL actually liked Malört when he tried it.
After dinner, Uncle drives us back to our hotel. He talks about how he's been driving for fifty years. When he was young, delivery driving was a great career in China. The government would train you up, and there was always work. He had driven big trucks, chemicals, and during one war or the other, cannons. He was almost sent to Vietnam, but fortunately, instead, they sent him elsewhere during the war to guard against the Soviets. It seems there wasn't a lot of trust between the two countries during the time, and China feared there might be trouble.
It is insisted that we are ready to be picked up by precisely 7:15 a.m. the next morning. This won't be a problem; we've been waking up at 5 a.m. at the latest. My inclination to sleep in when able is still less powerful than the jet lag. But the reasoning—that we're going to get picked up, ride the 5 minutes to Grandma's, eat breakfast, and leave by 7:30—sounds very optimistic. We've not yet completed a meal in less than an hour and a half.
It's 7:45 the next morning; my wife is splitting our third pastry as Auntie taps a hard-boiled egg on the table to peel. There are all sorts of Chinese breakfast pastries. The fried dough sticks are my favorite and come in sweet or savory variants. Also on offer are fried balls stuffed with a sweet bean paste and covered in sesame seeds, something like hash browns but using gelatinous rice, and finally, a flaky thing meant to be eaten with congee (a type of rice soup that is the single most common breakfast offering) that I can best describe as flaky pizza crust filled with a slim layer of buttery sweet spread. The car is packed, and we leave at 8.
We drop off our bags at a downtown Nanjing hotel where we'll stay for the next three days and head to the Zhongshan Mausoleum. Or as I might call it, Mount Nanjing Government History. But first, a brief overview of recent Chinese history according to FIL:
First, the dude the whole park is named after, Sun Yat-sen, establishes the Republic of China (ROC) by uniting the people of China against the Qing dynasty. It lasted for like 4 seconds before the warlords were like, "Nah, bruh, we want to control fiefs actually," and as they had most of the military power, the nascent ROC got rocked, maybe got rocked twice, possibly three times. Sun Yat-sen then goes and establishes a military school, finds allies in Russia, the US, and all freedom-loving Chinese farmers. Then WW2 happens, and the Japanese come into the picture. Everyone hates that. There's a three-way bloodbath for a while. The ROC + commies + Americans + farmers were led by a Chiang Kai-shek. Eventually, the Japanese and warlords lose, and the major question of whether to make an American (really more British in practice) style democracy or a more Soviet-style state is the next big topic. This is resolved by "look over there!" /hand-waving motion/ oh look, the CPC runs the mainland, and the ROC runs Taiwan, and both claim to run the whole thing, great.
We board a long golf cart. Along with us is the Syracuse grad student who likes Shadow Hart, an auntie, and two younger biology grad students that I'm not sure how we're connected to.
The first stop is the home of Chiang Kai-shek, the second ROC leader. It's very Western-styled inside. There is a small chapel. His wife, a Soong sister, is Christian. There's also a small 6-person barracks in the basement. The two slept in separate beds, which was apparently common at the time for wealthy people in China.
There's a whole exhibit on the three Soong sisters. Another one married Sun Yat-sen. They were all born in China but educated in the US. All throughout the park, I'm struck by how often there are connections to America mentioned. Roughly a third of the plaques in the park have English translations on them. I still don't see any Westerners all day, but I appreciate the accommodation.
We board our golf cart again and take a break from history to visit a cherry blossom garden. We are fortunate enough to be here while they were blossoming. The blossoms are white and come down in waves whenever the wind blows. These ones were gifts from a sister city in Japan. If you've seen cherry blossoms in anime it's basically like that.
While we were taking our pictures, we learn of Syracuse grad's lady troubles as he is distracted by her texts. He's seeing but not official with a girl set up through a family friend. She has an upcoming ski trip in Japan during her birthday and is upset that he plans to give her a gift after the trip rather than before it. We pry for details and learn that she is something like a medical sales rep. We'll be introduced to her later in the week.
Back in the golf cart and next stop is the mausoleum of the first Ming emperor. I'm beginning to notice that there aren't a lot of golf carts as we zoom past gates. I'd find out later that the two grad students in the party were justifying a VIP package. Everyone in the cart besides me and FIL has or is pursuing a PhD. MIL runs a research lab, and these two grad students were potential collaborators or something, so some grant or another is paying for this ride.
There's not too much to say here; the Ming dynasty started in the 1300s and is known for simple and less ostentatious rule. The tomb itself is buried somewhere and hasn't been opened. There is or was an order of hereditary guards to protect his tomb that still live in the area today. On the way back to the VIP-mobile, we stop and get some drinks. It's almost 90 degrees out, and we could use a cool-down. The rest of the group gets ice cream, my wife opting for a corn-flavored treat. I get a Coke Zero. Syracuse informed me that in China, Coke is called "happy drink for fat people," fair enough.
Next is lunch at the Buddhist temple. It's all vegetarian "monk noodles." Basically like if those big ramen bowls from anime had spaghetti in them along with soft tofu, mushrooms, an egg, and a few other veggies. Good and pretty cheap at 28 yuan for the premium bowl.
Hunger satisfied, we check out the Buddhist temple. The first shrine is the shrine of wealth, which doubles, appropriately, as the gift shop. There's something almost pure about a literal shrine to wealth. No circumlocutions here; you want wealth? Say no more, we've got just the place for you. Also, can I interest you in little Buddha statues? Although the girl manning the register isn't doing a good job selling the merchandise, slumped over snoozing on a display.
We stopped by the fertility shrine to have a word with that Buddha in particular, left a yuan coin on the rooster shrine that represents our zodiac, and said hi to a pale white cat that Syracuse says is always napping in the same position every time he's been here. Maybe the most zen creature in the whole temple. Finally, we visit the jewel of the temple. In a cool stone cavern beneath the main shrine is a piece of the cremains (what remains after cremation) of Tang Sanzang, the main character in "Journey to the West" who traveled to India to retrieve the original Buddhist texts. The remains are stored within an intricate golden miniature structure.
Having seen enough, it's time to return to the electric chariot. There is a 9-story pagoda, essentially a Chinese tower, that we stop in to get a good view of Nanjing.
Walking up all those steps turned out to be a preview as our final destination was the mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen. It's a huge structure, and you need to walk many steps up to the tomb. The steps supposedly represent the further effort needed by the people to complete the revolution. At the top, we pick up some lemonade and waters. Hydration has been a major struggle. The Chinese seem to broadly not care for water that isn't boiled and infused with herbs. Up at the top, though, they have the rare ice-cold water. I cherish the cold liquid, reminded of home.
MIL is very impressed with the scale of the structure, noting only emperors and kings had mausoleums this grand. I can't help but think that wasn't what Yat-sen was going for. There is something about the Chinese worldview that is still hard for my American brain to grok. They speak about ROC and CPC much the same as they speak of the Ming and Qing. Yat-sen may as well have been an emperor. We're living through another era in a long history. Of course, I have a very small and biased view into the Chinese mindset.
There's an exhibit after we finish at the mausoleum going through Sun Yat-sen's life. I'm not going to tell it better than Wikipedia. We're pretty exhausted; it's been a bit of a death march.
We have one last ride to the exit and walk to a restaurant located between a small lake and the imposing wall of Nanjing. This dinner is attended by a family friend who is also the boss of someone else in the family. His kid is studying in the US, a junior in college getting ready to apply for med school. My wife advises him on the process and will probably review his son's application. We drink through the two bottles of moutai he brought. During dinner we learn that Syracuse has come to a resolution with his not quite girlfriend that after the trip is fine but she expects two gifts.
We leave the restaurant feeling good. The temperature is dropping down to tolerable levels, and we walk a short distance to a bus stop, which we take back to the hotel.
I wrote this substack post due to my growing frustration with European innovation landscape compared to the US. We seem to follow technological development with at-least about a decade gap. Particularly when it comes to medical research, but others also. That is, if activist groups and political lobbying even allows it to be developed (see chatgpt being banned in Italy).
There is also regulatory burden when it comes to research. In the past year only, it has become exceedingly difficult to do any animal experiments in the Netherlands. This makes sense given the aim of completely 'phasing out' animal research by 2025 . I really hope the new minister of agriculture (Femke Wiersma), from the farmers party, can put a stop to this. I do not understand how supposedly intelligent people believe that animal research can be 'phased out'. Indeed, it is very easy to challenge them on this and receive no satisfying reply. This to me makes it seem more like 'feels over reals' sort of thing. I think a part of the regulatory burden is in part to ensure that the science aligns with ideology, which is perhaps why some places in the US are possibly worse than others.
I am not sure how much this explains. Of course with animal research its easy to say that it explains all of it. But things like GDPR and the research ethics stuff (for human research) seem more influenced by safetyism and ass-covering to me. Here, caution and risk avoidance have become virtues, which makes sense given the median age. I always remember back to the AstraZeneca debacle. Some very very small increase in chance of clots for a certain age group and if you were in this age group you could not get the vaccine full-stop. No matter if the statistics showed that things were actually on the net, positive, or whether you were tired of living under abject tyranny and saw this as a way out. You, as an adult could not make a decision regarding your own well being. Faceless bureaucracy did this for you. Likewise, currently when running any human experiment, it doesn't matter if you want to very much participate in an experiment.
If you have 3 kidneys and the MRI can see this, people can identify you and so this is personally identifiable information and therefore your 'informed consent' means nothing. I see 'consent' as a legacy of classical liberalism. We are paying lip service to it. But actually the consent of the paper pusher, is much more important here than that of the individual.
I really think the current trajectory is ruinous. As I finished off in my post, there are very real consequences to being left behind on the technology game.
There has been some recent usage of AI that has garnered a lot of controversy
- (top level comment) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/293580?context=8#context
- (top level comment, but now deleted post) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/292693?context=8#context
- (response to the deleted top level comment) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/292999?context=8#context
There were multiple different highlighted moderator responses where we weighed in with different opinions
- (@amadan) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/293601?context=8#context
- (@netstack) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/293094?context=8#context
- (@netstack) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/293068?context=8#context
- (@self_made_human) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/293159?context=8#context
- (@cjet79) https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/292776?context=8#context
The mods have been discussing this in our internal chat. We've landed on some shared ideas, but there are also some differences left to iron out. We'd like to open up the discussion to everyone to make sure we are in line with general sentiments. Please keep this discussion civil.
Some shared thoughts among the mods:
- No retroactive punishments. The users linked above that used AI will not have any form of mod sanctions. We didn't have a rule, so they didn't break it. And I thought in all cases it was good that they were honest and up front about the AI usage. Do not personally attack them, follow the normal rules of courtesy.
- AI generated content should be labelled as such.
- The user posting AI generated content is responsible for that content.
- AI generated content seems ripe for different types of abuse and we are likely to be overly sensitive to such abuses.
The areas of disagreement among the mods:
- How AI generated content can be displayed. (off site links only, or quoted just like any other speaker)
- What AI usage implies for the conversation.
- Whether a specific rule change is needed to make our new understanding clear.
Edit 1 Another point of general agreement among the mods was that talking about AI is fine. There would be no sort of topic ban of any kind. This rule discussion is more about how AI is used on themotte.