Ken's Blog

There was a lot of hand wringing on the left when the shutdown was shut down. To some it felt like a betrayal.

But I think it served its purpose. It gave our president a chance to show his true colors.

For anyone willing to pay attention, we learned that the Defecator in Chief not only doesn’t care about American citizens, but in fact saw the shutdown as an opportunity to actively starve American families and their children.

And why? What was the hill that the Republicans were willing to die on? Amazingly, it was so they could deny affordable health care to those same American families and their children.

The message was clear to anyone not completely locked into the Faux News fantasy world. Never before has an American administration shown such contempt and cruelty toward its own citizenry.

I wonder what future skills will emerge in the age of A.I. Certainly it will make some professions of today obsolete, much as advancing technology started to make telephone operators obsolete in the 1970s.

But what new skills will emerge? Just as the skill of photography requires the technology of photographs, and cinematography requires the technology of movies, what skills that are not yet even on our radar will start to become important?

Related questions: How will education change in the age of A.I.? Will law schools and medical schools need to radically rethink their curricula?

Sure, A.I. can do a lot for us, but it does not replace us humans. It would be more accurate to say that it offers the promise of leveling up the superpowers that we already have.

In the long run, how will future expertise and education change for photographers, cinematographers, architects, engineers, mathematicians, recording engineers, financial planners, and so on?

These are hard questions to answer. But it is important that we start to tackle them sooner rather than later.

There is really nothing quite like failure as a motivator. As Samuel Beckett once said “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Today I was disappointed that something didn’t go my way which I had fully expected to go my way. In moments that disappointed turned into a fire under my tail.

I was determined that I would get something to succeed, if for no other reason than to make myself feel better. So I got to work tackling a daunting computer programming problem that I had been putting off.

Sure enough, I got it working. And I probably never could have done it without having a good and proper failure under my belt.

Maybe there is some sort of law of conservation of failure. When something doesn’t work out, it just motivates us to try harder to accomplish something else.

Suppose the president of your country, the one that you voted into office a year ago, just spent the last month trying to starve your family. Is that grounds for losing faith in him?

I wonder how many Americans are trying to figure that out right about now.

I was talking with some friends this weekend, and somebody brought up the topic of the Titan submersible. We talked about how that terrible tragedy was precipitated by the hubris of OceanGate and of its founder Stockton Rush.

Then I said “Can anyone think of any other examples of great hubris leading to a great implosion?” In response, people just gave each other knowing looks, and we quickly changed the subject.

Our wealthy New Yorkers understand that everyone in this city needs to work together to protect the hardworking immigrants who wake up early every day to build our buildings, deliver our packages, prepare the food in our restaurants, keep our streets clean, and do all of the millions of tasks that make our city run. Those immigrants are our friends and our neighbors, and we cherish them.

And just has been true in the case of Central Park, most of those wealthy New Yorkers will wish to protect their home and their neighbors. They will not stand for the world’s greatest city to be turned into a war zone just to satisfy one man’s fragile ego and lust for power.

Recently in San Francisco, the dogs were called off because a wealthy friend of the president called him up on the phone and said that he didn’t want that kind of thing happening in the city where he lived. I suspect that if necessary, the White House (what’s still left of it) will get a similar phone call from New York.

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There will be some wealthy New Yorkers who will leave NYC because their politics and world view is fundamentally aligned with that of our president. But that profile is not a good fit for most wealthy New Yorkers, just as it is not a good fit for New Yorkers in general.

In the coming war (and yes, it will be a war) between the forces of community and kindness, versus the forces of selfish acquisitiveness, most wealthy New Yorkers will choose the former. I know many wealthy New Yorkers, and I can tell you first hand that the great majority of them are not at all like our president.

Those New Yorkers will be willing to pay more in taxes because (1) They understand that it is actually fair to do so, and because (2) They believe in this city, and understand what a unique and rare privilege it is to live here. The right wing fantasy that having a lot of money makes you as morally low functioning, narcissistic and sociopathic as our president is just that — a fantasy.

More tomorrow.

… except, that is, spending the entire weekend with good friends. 🙂

Eventually you realize that there is nothing better than spending a day with good friends.

Officials in New York State, from Governor Hochul on down, have been preparing for months for the possibility of a military-style assault on the city by our federal government. There have been coordinated meetings, contingency plans, and strategic workshops on how to engage in peaceful protest without letting the invaders succeed in provoking violence.

A key player in all of this is the moneyed class. The fantasy that those people will flee the city because of higher taxes is just that — a fantasy.

If you have all the money in the world, New York City offers a life experience that cannot be duplicated anywhere else. You have, at your fingertips, world class theater and opera and concerts and museums and galleries and shopping and cultural events of all sorts.

This is important because in the defense of the city from military-style invasion designed to provoke violence, the wealthiest New Yorkers have a special role to play. More tomorrow.