A quick Ranking of DC restaurants I’ve eaten at within the past 6 months of so:
Moon Rabbit > Rumi’s Kitchen > Chloe > Blue Duck Tavern > Rasika > Albi > The Dabney
For all his good work, Jose Andres’s restaurants are lackluster. Oyamel was just OK. Jaleo and China Chilcano stank. Haven’t been to Zaytinya but I doubt it could be better than Rumi’s Kitchen and Chloe.
The most recent episode of Conversations with Tyler featured Ezra Klein as a guest. I won’t delve into their discussion, but I will note two quirks in Tyler’s thinking that were somewhat off-brand.
When Ezra mentioned mass firings and re-hirings in the federal government, Tyler expressed uncertainty about that actually being the case — essentially a denial of what is widely known. As a counter, Ezra mentioned knowing people who were fired. I, too, know people who were fired simply because they got promoted and transitioned from contractors to full-time employees within the last two years, despite having deep expertise in the subject matter they were hired for. The “I’m not sure that’s happening” sounds what one would hear on the streets of Berlin in the late 1930s, motivated reasoning par excellence.
Another example is Tyler’s tendency to extrapolate into the future and then use that hypothetical future as a benchmark for current policy. Think “Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person” at some unspecific time in the future as a context for massive federal government downsizing now. We do not, in fact, have billion-dollar companies run by a single person; that is a VC pitch at best, and if we are being less generous pure vaporware. Government hiring policy by vaporware sounds bad.
I think Tyler was aiming for provocation. He didn’t mention in his show notes that he “tried to “push him further from a libertarian point of view”, but then what is he really thinking? To come back to the 1930s analogy, I picture this interview’s version of Tyler in the FDR-era US and I see him praising Charles Lindbergh (they both speak German) and Henry Ford — progress über alles — and not really being a fan of FDR. Yikes!
It was time for my quarterly now page update. Ludus longus, vita brevis.
A brief Q&A:
When Tim Berners-Lee has something to say about the future of social media I listen, even if it ends up being a pitch for his next two projects. They are Solid, a standard of data sharing across platforms, and Inrupt, a “data wallet” built on top of Solid. Godspeed, and may he avoid xkcd #927.
A less hopeful harbinger of the future: someone in Serbia — most likely the government — seems to have used sonic weapons to disperse a 100K+ strong crowd of peaceful protestors. Here is a convincing audio analysis, and here are a few videos. Coming soon to a protest near you.
🏀 Jordan Poole of the Washington Wizards (bottom of the Eastern conference, worst win/loss ratio in the league) served a 35-foot buzzer-beater yesterday to beat the Denver Nuggets (top three of the Western conference, 2023 NBA Champions). This is the Wizards' second win against the Nuggets, the first one being back in December. So it is, in fact, a season sweep. Sport is nontransitive, as are so many other things in life.
Here is a great quote on leadership in John Gruber’s pre-post-mortem of Apple Intelligence:
The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
“Leadership” is a suitcase word and although I disagree with most of the concepts packed into it, maybe it has not become completely useless.
Facts about the District’s budget from DC council member Charles Allen:
Like any other state, DC’s budget is mostly funded through local tax revenue and fees. About 25% of our budget is from federal programs, largely Medicaid and Medicare, in line with or lower than most US states.
The DC Council and Mayor have collaborated to pass 28 consecutive balanced budgets.
DC continues to have one of the strongest bond ratings of any municipality in the country and has fully funded its pensions.
DC is the only jurisdiction in the nation that budgets out four years on the operations side and six on the capital side to ensure responsible spending.
So if you are reading the history of the 20th century, and come to the 1930s, and you ask yourself “how could people have allowed this to happen”, well, this is how. IYIs too smart for their own good, accepting a guaranteed disaster to prevent an inconvenience.
There is also the small matter of DC city government not being allowed to spend $1.1B of its own money — which it had already collected! — because who needs police and public schools? The colonies revolted for less.