Let’s say you’re involved in home construction. Traditionally that involves putting up walls, setting up the HVAC, doing the wiring, etc.

But a robot comes out that’s very good at that.

Are you out of a job? No.

Turns out building the walls was never really the hard part, it was making sure the structure of the home could meet expected lateral and gravity loads with minimal cost while providing a pleasant and airy interior.

And the HVAC is less about installing the unit and more about creating a ventilation strategy that balances perceived temperature (not at the thermostat!), pressure, and operating cost.

But they build a robot that’s very good at that too.

Turns out the hard part of homebuilding was coordinating all the components so you don’t put up the drywall and then the internet doesn’t work because you put the Ethernet cables too close to the electrical wiring.

The robot has an update, it can do that too now.

Now the difficulty is talking to customers, building trust, and helping them understand the trade-offs in front of them. Customers don’t know anything about homes, yet you must help them choose between a walk-in pantry or a dedicated laundry room on the bedroom floor, because they can’t afford both.

Somehow, they build a robot that’s good at this too.

Well the hard part is sourcing quality materials at a good price and making sure your robots show up on time with the tools and materials they need to do the job you’ve clearly specified.

New update.

The hard part is now striking deals with developers and creating an efficient production pipeline of homes to make sure their customers get their homes on time.

Update.

Market research to create a collection of pre-made home designs that satisfy 90% of customers while cutting material costs 30% due to massive bulk orders and speeding up inspections.

Update.

Building a coalition of local interest groups in order to rezone new land for development, getting the city to commit to building roads and power/water hookups.

Update.

Getting bigger margins by designing more liveable communities with parks, schools, trails, retail/office space, and public transit connections.

And so on.

In software, we’ve been laddering our way up the levels of abstraction like this for decades.

If you’ve studied a complex system for years, like the U.S. financial system or the global supply chain network, you might be able to understand just how many abstraction layers we’ve built up in software. But for a layman without this experience, it can be hard to imagine.

And every time we’ve solved a layer of the software problem and made it easier, the demand for more software increased.

Yes, we’re laddering a lot faster now with AI. For now, humans have been comfortably moving on to the next level of abstraction above AI.

Is there an end to the ladder? I don’t see one, but I know I can’t see very far. I don’t know.

I do know that at each level of abstraction we introduce new difficulties. People to make happy, complex trade-offs to balance, and ever longer term planning.

This is tough for both LLMs and humans. Not every engineer makes it to the next level of the ladder. And at each step the LLMs will find it harder to understand what the problem is and how to measure if it’s solved.

Problems become more wicked.

• We stop having easy solutions like “made it twice as fast” and instead it’s “if we make it twice as fast it costs 1.4x more” where a dozen stakeholders have different opinions on what the best option is.
• Solutions become irreversible and require large amounts of investment. What if we fundamentally rearchitected our system? Is that necessary to survive the three years, or would it cost $20m for little reward?

I’m not saying humans will always be one step ahead of the LLMs. I don’t know how this could go. But this is how I’m thinking about it.

As to how that affects software engineering careers, I don’t know.

Maybe:

• The ladder tops out and LLMs can solve software problems cheaper than humans. Software engineering goes the way of the farriers.
• Even if software demand grows, staffing could still shrink if productivity grows faster.
• AI takes over all white collar work.
• Some software engineers create new roles with less technical emphasis but with more fun, impact, and compensation, while others fall off the ladder.
• LLMs peter out in a year and technical skills remain highly valued, everything stays the same.

One consequence of this is it can be difficult to tell where your values end and where others’ begin. One might not even realize there’s a difference.

But there often is.

2
You can change your social environment to try to shake off some baggage. Some values will fade, and others will rise. But they can be sticky: even if you haven’t seen someone for a while, their influence may linger on in your worldview and expectations. For the deepest bonds, this can last for years.

Another problem is that when you’re lost and confused, it’s easy to end up in a different crowd with a compelling value system that still isn’t your own.

But realistically, old bonds are often the strongest and you’ll end up with your feet in different worlds. Still, the journey is likely to teach you a lot about yourself and hand you the new problem of figuring out how to live in accordance with your new values.

3
Imagine a block of wood. As you think and act, you carve grooves into that block. The more you follow a certain path—certain thoughts, certain behaviors—the deeper that groove becomes. Next time, it’s easier to follow the same path, because you slip into it.

Then you’re an adult, and you realize your life isn’t going well. You want to change. You make a firm resolution to change. You read a lot of books on how you’ve been f—king it up. But you still keep slipping back into the old grooves.

Change is hard. It happens in brief, rare windows where the old pattern is kicking in but you catch it in time to alter your course. Most of the time you breeze through on automatic and don’t notice until a week later that you’ve done as you always do.

But the regret of missing the window sharpens your attention for the next opportunity, and you even start to manufacture some of these rare windows.

So you make a plan, you catch that moment, you act differently and leave a faint groove in the new direction. You likely feel more bewildered than satisfied, in uncharted territory. But it’s Good.

Then you understand that fighting your nature isn’t pleasant, and it can take years to alter aspects of your core personality. It’s a life’s work that few finish, like learning a language.

You have to be realistic about what’s possible. Sometimes it’s easier to accept yourself and work around your shortcomings. This is not to be pessimistic, you just have to pick your battles.

4
You strive to change, but your bonds expect you to stay the same. As you push to break out of your old mold, some bonds will break, some will change, and new ones will appear.

You can use this. Change is much easier in new contexts where you can metaphorically flip the block to a fresh side where you haven’t carved any grooves. We all have better and worse sides waiting to be brought out. Find people that naturally pull you toward your better self.

Which means being careful with who you allow into your life. Their values and desires will rub off on you. They may be attractive, but do you want your soul to look like theirs?

Eating is a very base human activity: you do it and it’s over. You’re the same person going out as you are going in. It’s a purely sensory experience, sometimes it feels good and sometimes it’s meh.

Eating is on exactly the same level as pooping.

2.

So it’s confusing when people pay for luxury restaurants, or any restaurant that isn’t going for the “best bang for your buck” angle.

Why do so many restaurants have Instagram pages?

Well if you ask people who go to those places, they’ll say it’s a social thing. But you can have a social gathering at someone’s apartment (which is free), a park (also free), or a cheap restaurant.

What explains this?

Well you know how Marlboro got men to buy their cigarettes in droves by plastering pictures of masculine cowboys all over the world?

Well, restaurants are also selling self-image. French fine dining sells one image. High-end tacos another. Ramen a third. They’re selling you an identity with the pretext of food.

3.

But what about people with such refined palates that they can’t stand eating anywhere low quality?

Imagine you had a friend that spent $100 a week on luxury flavoured water. They just can’t stand the subtle notes in regular water anymore. I’d say they screwed themselves over by running too far on the hedonic treadmill and they could save a lot of money by untraining their palate.

4.

And just like eating, you can put effort into pooping to make it feel better.

Ever since I started loads of vegetables, I have fantastic poops in the mornings that reliably make me feel aftershocks throughout the day. A healthy meal will fuel me for a day, while a good poop will put a lightness into my attitude, and that’s just as important. And pooping is free.

If your poops aren’t this good, you’re missing out.

Moral Mazes — Robert Jackall — 1988

A sociologist embeds with the managers of 80s corporate America, and studies their lives and worldviews. What is their social reality? What is their day to day experience like? Futher, given that bureaucratic managerial logic is ubiqitous in our society and our lives, what does that do to us?

The following quote may seem like an unreadable run-on sentence, but after reading this book I see a profound statement about American society, as if one fish grabbed the other and exclaimed “we’re living in water!”

Bureaucracy in large American corporations regularizes people’s experiences of time and indeed routinizes their lives by engaging them on a daily basis in rational, socially approved, purposive action; it brings them into daily proximity with and subordination to authority, creating in the process upward-looking stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences; it places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals; and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides.

It then veers into very interesting chapters on the development of the field of public relations, so interesting indeed that I switched from the audiobook to the paperback so I could pen and highlight. The 2nd edition concludes with a very nice essay on the 2008 financial crisis that I couldn’t find online anywhere.

An excellent book, not too difficult to read, short, and very insightful.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson — Robert A. Caro — 1982, 1990, 2002, 2012

This ~3500 page series of books taught me an enormous amount about midcentury America and its political system, and I feel it generalises so that key parts of the functioning of the world have been demystified to me.

How does the senate work? How do people win elections? How do politicians turn power into money and back into more power? These problems really are so complicated they require months of mental immersion into the political world to understand, which these books granted me.

As always, Caro writes his characters and narratives so well that despite the ostensibly dry subject matter, it’s an easy read after the first few hundred pages as you get emotionally invested.

The story of the 1948 Senate Election in Texas so incredible that I memorised it and tell it to girls on first dates.

This series of four books were the logical continuation of The Power Broker, which was my highest rated book of last year.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes — Tamim Ansary — 2009

The story of the founding of Islam is breathtaking, the story of the first four Imams interesting, and the slide into the corruption is tragic but obviously inevitable.

A repeating pattern: disaster comes to the Muslim world, millions flock to a conservative reactionary movement which promises a return to better days and moral purity, and the situation gets worse. I get it, the promise of Islam is intoxicating and incredible: Dar al-Islam, Sharia, the moral purity, the discipline, and the prayer. Unfortunately the grand Islamic project seems to consistently run head first into the base nature of humans.

After reading this book, talking to Muslims, visiting a mosque during prayer, it’s clear to me that Islam is overall a good thing, the many failures of Arab and that Muslim states don’t detract from Islam as a personal creed. And I respect all those who earnestly try to adhere to it, even if they fail. But those who pretend to be good Muslims on Friday evenings for the social benefits but do not practice any of the virtues, those I scorn.

The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944–1945 — Robert M. Citino — 2012

This book covers two things, an explanation for how is it that the Wehrmacht continued to put up such a fight even when the war was clearly lost for years, and an in depth look at the usually glossed over final year of the war (which is far more interesting than I thought).

Despite the German officer corps widespread understanding there was zero chance of victory and hadn’t been for years, the army kept piecing itself together into launching more hail mary counter-attacks until the bitter end.

How is this possible? How could they know it was pointless, yet still sacrifice their own lives and the lives of their soldiers to continue fighting? And after being thrown back and shattered yet again, why did the soldiers continue to serve? What lead to this absurd and horrible system? The answer lies in Prussian military tradition.

⭐⭐

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power — Daniel Yergin — 1990

A history of oil. The biggest lesson I learned is that oil has antigravity properties: it desires to rise up out the ground. No human effort can stop its march from the ground and into our engines.

Taught me a lot about Middle Eastern politics, how a leveraged buyout works, and oil’s relation to great power security. But despite its enormous length I feel like it was missing some deeper analysis, and was mostly a collection of interesting stories to do with oil.

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II — Keith Lowe — 2012

The violence in Europe didn’t end with the war.

After peace, the continent experienced catstrophic collapse of its water, electrical, food, policing, legal, and political systems. It was anarchy and the only organisations capable of filling these vacuums were armies, i.e. millions of young men trained only in killing. They were not equipped to recover Europe, and the appetite for more funding and continued mobilization to police and stabilize europe was rapidly dwindling. And yet, all knew that to allow Europe to maintain in this savage state would invite further disaster down the line.

• Europeans returned to their homes and found them occupied, and were told it was a shame the Nazis hadn’t killed them.
• During the war those who used to live side by side had been racialised by the Nazis, once the war was over pogroms, civil wars, and state-sponsored population transfers led to their seperation into ethnically homogenous nation states.
• The Polish took over a Nazi concentration camp and used it re-enact a revenge against Germans.
• The Germans quickly convinced themselves that they too were victims of the war, victims of a dictatorship and the Soviets.

Anyways I was going to write up all these interesting things I learned, but the main thing is to cover this quite interesting period of history that teaches us quite a bit about what happens to civilized people when their civilization collapses around them. It’s not good.

Penguin Great Ideas: Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud — 1930

We all have base instincts and desires. To do whatever we want, to kill, to cheat, to litter, to steal. But society — civilization — demands the constant and severe repression of these instincts. This creates resentment and discontentment. Sounds simple, but it’s pretty profound.

I see this in the form of Germany and Japan being very good at this kind of civilizational repression, but it comes out in their high rate of strange fetishes. And woke was another attempt of societal mass repression for prosocial causes, but it caused immense discontent. I dunno, writing this out it seems pretty simple, but really you got to read the original words.

But it’s filled with Freud’s strange theories and is kind of hard to read, so two stars.

Diaspora — Greg Egan — 1997

A very interesting sci-fi book. Heavy on the ideas, weak on the plot and characters. To be honest, the first three or so chapters are the most interesting part, the main plot was boring.

Touching the Void — Joe Simpson — 1988

A great story of a mountaineering expedition gone horribly wrong. Easy to read, gripping, and short.

Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 — Robert M. Citino — 2007

An interesting book for a WWII nerd, but not quite as interesting as The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand.

This Is China: The First 5,000 Years — Berkshire Pub Group — 2021

A very short 120 page book covering five thousand years of Chinese history. I recommend it, mostly as a way to whet your appetite.

Penguin Great Ideas: On the Suffering of the World — Arthur Schopenhauer — 1851

A short collection of excerpts by Schopenhauer. Gotta say, this guy was a genius. Very clear eyed about many things. I don’t remember what I read in this one, but I’m sure the thoughts he introduced have stuck with me.

Penguin Great Ideas: Why I Write — George Orwell — 1946

Orwell writes well and enjoyably. Another one where I’m not quite sure I remember what he wrote about, but I remember it was a great read at the time.

The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder — 1981

A decent story about an early computer startup.

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir - 2021

A scifi book for engineers, fun problem solving. I liked it, couldn’t put it down once I got into it.

Fine Structure — qntm — 2017

I really enjoyed this despite the plot holes and some incoherence, it was still very interesting and tense.

⭐

Penguin Great Ideas: On Friendship — Michel de Montaigne — 1580

Mainly this book taught me that people in the past could be really f—king smart. Guy was two centuries ahead of his time.

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius — 180

To be honest, not sure how much I got out of this.

Mickey 7 - Edward Ashton - 2022

Beach read. Not bad, just, not great.

Penguin Great Ideas:A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf — 1929

A small collection of works by Woolf. I don’t remember what I read in this one.

The Last Policeman — Ben H. Winters — 2012

A well researched sci-fi book about what happens to society when we find out an enormous meteor will strike the earth in six months.

The plot and characters aren’t interesting, but the worldbuilding is decent.

Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion — Dan Simmons — 1989, 1990

Very frustrating books. The first one is amazingly written, until it gets to the completely moronic ballbuster cliffhanger ending. The author might as well have added a postscript saying “buy the next book to find out what happens next!”. And so I did, and I feel he came so close to pulling of something incredible, but right at the end the pieces don’t come together right and they all fall apart.

A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway — 1929

An easy to read book, but I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn from this one. Hemingway’s a good writer in a technical sense, but I’m starting to wonder if he maybe wasn’t that bright.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea — Yukio Mishima — 1963

Well-written, but this book is just Mishima’s fetishistic fantasies about sailors and death. I was very unhappy after reading this. Especially after reading Confessions of a Mask, this was a huge dissapointment.

Two people in dialogue is great, very focused.

Three can be great, but you need a good third that’s more of an active audience member than a participant.

Four is borderline. That’s really the limit, but it can work with the right set of people.

Five is no good. I’m out.

In my experience the rule is that the more people you add, the worse the conversation.

Imagine you have two people talking. They dive into a topic. They find common ground and work together to increase the shared pool of knowledge. Momentum and comfort build: connection.

Then a third person joins the conversation:

• They need context to be filled in. Time is wasted explaining background details.
• There’s a creeping hesitancy around sharing deeply personal thoughts or secrets.
• The third person might divert the conversation into a tangent, wrecking the previous build-up. Effectively, the attention span of the group decreases and it’s no longer able to focus.
• The third person might be ill equipped to contribute and say irrelevant or ill-informed things that must either be ignored (socially uncomfortable) or politely rebuffed (kills conversational momentum).

The conversation is dead. You’ve reverted back to the background noise of socially approved “does pineapple belong on pizza?” conversation.

The corollary to this is that if I’m sitting at the lunch table and two people besides me are engrossed in a conversation, I will sit silently and listen. Perhaps I’ll contribute if I feel like I can, or I’ll leave quickly if it’s not interesting, but I won’t thoughtlessly barge in and make a mess of something beautiful.

The worst is the self-justifications. “Well I have nothing else to do on the train” and “well sometimes you just want to relax for an hour after work”. It’s as if by invoking these magic words you can erase any bad-feelings or social shame, an inviolable psychological self-defense. Well I feel for you, I certainly partake in narcotic internet content despite what I’ve written here, but maybe wonder if the reason you feel so exhausted is because the feeds are determinedly displacing as much human life out of your day as possible, if you haven’t mixed up cure and disease.

Allow yourself to explore the wonders of human culture without the intermediation of vast technological forces you barely comprehend, allow yourself to be bored enough that watching an old movie seems like a good time, allow reality to creep back in at the edges of your consciousness and nurture that painful clarity until you can taste pure curiosity perhaps for the first time since you were a small child.

“Yeah, I should-“ Stop! If by your words you agree with this post but by your actions you don’t, it is only your actions that count. You wish you were someone who preferred real life and emotions and desires over algorithmic internet content, but you aren’t! Perhaps accepting that they’ve been warping your mind since it was at its most plastic and now you’re dependent is the first step to undoing it. Try anger.

A better way is possible.

I do not allow YouTube to show me recommendations, I have zapped this out of my life. YouTube is not sucking the life directly out of my mind with “educational videos” ¹. Reddit, the same. TikTok, god no.

I do not allow Netflix or YouTube or Prime to feed me video content. I pick what movie to watch next by going to the Wikipedia pages of actors, directors, or movements I like. I have found extraordinary films simply by clicking on what’s deemed worthy of being mentioned on Wikipedia that I never would have fed by an algorithm optimized for the general populace.

I hear about interesting books by living in society and impulsively buy them until I have a small but growing stack of books to read next whenever I finish one.

Little practices, slow acclimatizaiton to a low-internet life, constant setbacks. I tell you, the more you remove the internet from your life, the better it tastes.

Beware, it’s a dedicated oppponent, the battle against it is one you can only ever fight, never win, but worth fighting all the same.

“Viral memes” in the Dawkins sense are ideas that spread from one human mind to the next, mutating along the way exactly like a virus. It’s exactly Darwinian evolution. A good example is “Hawk Tuah”.

But “Black Lives Matter” is also a good example of a viral meme. A three word bomb, when I first heard it my face flushed in indignation. How could one phrase have such a powerful effect? And it was so fit to thrive in the information environment that it reigned unchanged for years. Incidentally BLM was coined at about the same time as race relations in America started getting a lot worse ¹. I’m not suggesting some causation one way or the other.

But it’s not just phrases. These memes can be very complex, not easily legible. There was a latent vulnerability in our population, due to a lack of exposure we lost our antibodies against a certain memeplex, but eventually darwinian evolution produced MAGA and Donald Trump and it exploded in the half the country that wasn’t already totally infected with another meme.

And the internet is the supreme accelerant to this process. Everyone in the world is forced to live in the same city. And there’s trillions in building better evolutionary environments (Twitter, TikTok, etc). ²

I grew up on the internet, and I loved it. It was a weird thing to be a heavy internet user. Us internet addicts were a small part of the population, but I was very proud. In retrospect those years were deeply unhealthy.

And the internet back then was a toy. It’s a superweapon now, aimed at ourselves. Crafted with trillions of dollars of investment and some of the smartest minds of our era. The internet is to the printing press what an ICBM is to a cannon. It’s effective against everyone. And it’s far more potent than it used to be.

Yet we’re still in the early stages.

Now, the internet really isn’t all bad. Having tried to live without it many times, it’s indispensable. It enriches my life, it’s a wonderful thing.

One of my pet beliefs is that I don’t think humans should have much write access to the internet. I don’t think it’s good that we let anyone say anything they want on the internet and anyone can read it. I think only institutions should be allowed to write to the internet. Like Wikipedia, news outlets (including tiny three-man outfits), and the state. And of course the internet is critical to running a modern economy.

But this’ll never happen, there’s no policy prescription here. Maybe in ten years the tide turns and we all decide the internet is actually quite harmful and we quit it like smoking, or limit it like unhealthy foods. It’s possible.

So what to do?

I go to work without my phone. The subway ride, phoneless, musicless, can be mentally tough. But I consider those withdrawal symptoms. And I like my job, so it’s nice not to be distracted by a phone.

I try to go outside without any technology every day. Maybe just to watch the sunset for thirty minutes, or to read a book at the park.

It takes a long time, but you get used to the reduced stimulus.

Watching the leaves on a tree sway is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen online. There is far far more variety in sunsets than I thought. And I’ve fallen in love with oil portraiture.

My thoughts proceed in long clear chains. My subconscious, no longer smothered by constant stimulus and external memes, has become my intelligent companion with many good ideas. I can spend my time working on deeper interests that demand much but have the greatest rewards.

I haven’t gone cold turkey of course. It’s too hard, I always break (have to unblock youtube to watch a cooking video), and then I binge.

The methods I’ve found that work the best are to limit the dangerous things, the feeds ³.

I use my adblocker to block all the videos on the youtube homepage so I can’t see anything there. I can still watch individual videos, but the related videos on the right hand side doesn’t work. So I can still watch videos that I need to, or search for the two youtubers that I watch regularly, but YouTube can’t put another cigarrete in my hand the moment I’m done with the first.

The ship is a monstrosity. It’s never had drydock maintenance, built entirely at sea. Shipbuilding technology has evolved rapidly every year, and many construction decisions “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Consequently, the ship constantly catches fire, with half of it under rebuild at any given moment.

The ship has sprouted catamaran-like secondary hulls, symbiotic growths connected by struts and pipes. For example, years ago, there was a plan to switch to trendy high-efficiency jet fuel turbines. During the switchover, we needed twice the fuel tanks, so we hastily bought a small jet fuel tanker, welded it to the hull, but then oil prices crashed, and the retrofit was abandoned. Now there’s a cute little jet fuel tanker stuck to the side, kept around “just in case.”

You’re darting over rope rigging when you encounter your current headache: the fuel pumping system. It was installed years ago by some assholes (it’s a well-known fact that once a sailor leaves a ship, he becomes an asshole happy to accept blame for any problem), and it uses custom parts from a long-defunct company, and they left no documentation. It works perfectly—unless someone tries to improve it. Every attempted tweak has caused a breakdown and a panicked fix. After too many disasters, other departments threatened to switch to electricity, so now nobody dares touch it.

This wouldn’t matter if fuel demand weren’t about to double with the new diesel generators coming online. The diesel generator team had been claiming that installation was imminent for over a year, but last week they started installing pipe fittings, triggering a scramble to figure out how we were going to double our fuel output.

Among the higher-ups, there’s been a big argument over whether to upgrade the existing system, build an entirely new system alongside the old one, or beg the diesel team to delay because we didn’t think they were serious.

Incrementally upgrading the current system is your best option (if it works): it’s proven reliable, cost-effective, and manageable. Solving this would be a huge feather in your cap. Never mind that three guys have already tried and failed. They didn’t have your skills!

You tell your boss, “I need a month to fix the bottlenecks.”

“Look,” your boss says, bags under his eyes from decades fighting battles that could only be fought but never won, “take three weeks. Just focus on writing a solid maintainability report. Anything else is biting off more than you—or anyone—can chew.”

After two weeks obsessively mapping every obscure pipe and valve placement, your brain is numb. You’ve discovered, to your horror, the fuel system is essentially a massive hydraulic computer, riddled with self-regulating siphons, inverted Pythagorean cups, and even what looked suspiciously like ancient water clocks. Pipes loop through unused chambers, occasionally rerouting fluid for no clear reason. Your best guess is it handles obscure pressure issues when the boiler starts up and while the outboard motors are on full power—but can’t test your hypothesis. And this is just one of the dozen baffling subsystems.

Your notes are a sprawling mess; you’re on version four of the “big explainer doc.” You dream about pipes, and you don’t like eating macaroni or penne anymore. You lean back heavily, rubbing your temples. There’s no way you’re solving this in the week left. You’ll come crawling back to your manager and go back to laying pipes for the pneumatic messaging system¹, inching along toward adopting the standard everyone in the industry agrees is definitely the future.

Defeated, you go vent to your buddy from agriculture at lunch. You’re about to leave when he tilts his head.

“You know, I was doing some reading of some old docs, and a couple years back we had a project to increase fuel self-sufficiency. Middle East tensions spiked oil futures, so we’re probably still mixing in vegetable oils and ethanol from our wormy corn.”

You’re stunned. He continues, “Doubt anyone turned that off; boosts our budget.”

“Wait,” you say, dropping your spoon. “You’re making ethanol in the old fermentation tanks?”

“Yeah,” your buddy shrugs. “We’ve sent biofuel your way for maybe three years now. Nobody complained.”

You stare at the table. Suddenly, it makes sense: weird flow rates, unpredictable stalls, baffling chambers, strange edge cases.

You groan. You bet the work logs would confirm the new fuel system was built exactly as biodiesel inputs began. Those assholes who built the fuel pump weren’t assholes—they were heroes who unknowingly designed a system robust enough for viscous, unstable trash fuel. And just like you, they were probably engineers with no prior experience with fuel pumping systems. They just didn’t know any better. And you can’t even blame Agriculture—how were they supposed to know if nobody complained, and the captain’s goal of fuel self-sufficiency was achieved.

Your buddy squints. “So…should we stop?”

You exhale and put your head in your hands. A solution slowly comes to mind: disconnect the biofuels and hook up that unused jet fuel tanker. But that would take months and require routing pipes through medical. You wince. That was going to be a problem for your boss’s boss. After that, the fuel pump would handle the same throughput, but at much higher energy density. Then you could rip out the old pumping system entirely and replace it with something simple. A long-term fix.

“No,” you sigh. “Just tell me who to talk to so I can understand what’s going on at your end. Thanks for the tip.”

Later, you wonder if there’s a better way. Less chaos, better training, clearer planning, standards followed from the start.

But forty years ago, ships mostly hugged coasts, powered by sails and oars—essential yet small-scale. Now, enormous ships dominate the oceans, approaching “small sovereign country” status. The global economy became critically dependent on them in under two decades, shipping capacity exploding sevenfold. Everything is changing too quickly. Maybe in twenty years, shipbuilding will stabilize—or perhaps the chaos will only accelerate.

In 1941, Lyndon B. Johnson (34), future President of the United States, is a freshman House Representative from Texas when one of the senators from his great state dies.

Now, a Senator (one of two) has a lot more power than a Congressman (one of twenty-one). And for a man like Lyndon Johnson who’s been obsessed with power since he was a tween, a Senate seat was the obvious stepping stone to his dream of the Oval Office. With the seat, he would have a solid base to amass power on the national stage in preparation for a Presidential bid a decade or two down the line.

Three years ago Johnson was a lowly congressional secretary when he decided to run an incredible longshot campaign for Texas’ 10th Congressional District, and through his incredible determination and a lot of money, he had won the seat. He’d been a total nobody in the district and he’d won anyways. And in this Senate race, he again would be a nobody, only known in two of twenty-one districts, but that had hardly stopped him before.

But the situation really was not great for Johnson. In order to clinch the seat, he would have to defeat the very popular State Attorney Gerald Mann, and the nationally famous Martin Dies Jr., who was the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Before the campaign even started, the odds were grim:

• 33% W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel (The Governor, who would later declare that he would not run)

• 26% Gerald Mann (Attorney General)

• 9% Martin Dies Jr. (Chairman of the HUAC)

• 5% Lyndon B. Johnson (Protagonist)

Raising the stakes further for Johnson, when Texas sent a senator to Washington, it kept him there. The average tenure of a Senator from Texas during this era was eighteen years. In fact we now know that it wouldn’t be until 1953 – twelve years later – that Tom Connally, the other Senator from Texas, would step down. But at the time all Lyndon knew was that if he missed this chance at the Senate seat, there likely wouldn’t be another for a long time. And his rising star would stutter and he’d be forced to spend a decade in relative obscurity and far away from anything like true national power.

So Johnson started campaigning immediately, and he started campaigning hard. And he started by using the tool that worked so well for him last time: money.

Johnson bought out the small weekly newspapers that covered the state. As long as the paper kept reprinting Johnson campaign press releases as if they were news, the Johnson campaign would make $25 ad buys every week. He did this for ten weeks, for hundreds of papers. Nobody knows how many papers were bought like this, but let’s say it was half of Texas’s 400 weekly newspapers: that’s $50,000, the cost of a typical campaign right there, just in newspaper buys. This only accounts for the small weekly newspapers, not the sixty daily papers he bought ads in (on which we don’t have data). He even cut out the middleman and started his own newspaper, just for the campaign.

There was no statewide radio in Texas; instead, there were about sixty stations scattered across the state. If you wanted to send a broadcast to every voter, you cobbled together enough chunks of airtime from enough stations to blanket the whole state, to the tune of $4000 for half an hour. Johnson made these broadcasts regularly.

Johnson had twelve two-man teams roving the state at all times, meeting voters and schmoozing local power brokers. It cost about $100 a week to support a man out on the road, which comes to a total of $24,000 over the course of the campaign on these teams.

And there were many other costs. There were the thousands of billboards of himself he’d had plastered across the state. There were the barbecues where Johnson made sure everyone went home with meat enough to feed their family for days. There were the eighty-two paid typists who sent personalised follow-up letters to anyone Johnson’s roving schmooze teams met.

In this era, a typical political campaign in Texas cost $50,000. An expensive campaign might run up to $80,000. In his first few weeks, Johnson had spent at least a $100 thousand, and probably much more.

A month after the death of the Senator, the polling numbers stood as such:

• 42% for Mann

• 40% for Dies

• 15% for Johnson

But Dies spent all his rallies raging against communist infiltrators and refused to campaign outside his district: he would quickly become irrelevant outside his district. And Johnson’s money started to tell, despite his unpleasant demeanour with voters and his atrocious speeches, he was surging.

Two weeks later a different poll showed Johnson in second at 19%, close behind Mann in first at 27%. And the trend towards Johnson was only accelerating.

Corruption

But how does a politician get this kind of money? Why did Lyndon get so much money but Mann didn’t? Well, it was because Lyndon was corrupt and Mann wasn’t.

Lyndon’s key financial backer was Herman Brown. Johnson had many, many inflows of money, but the largest by far was Herman Brown.

See, years ago Herman Brown was not a rich man, but a small-time Texas construction magnate surviving off petty road-building contracts that barely kept his company afloat. But Johnson made him very rich, and Herman paid for what he received with hundreds of thousands of dollars of political contributions.

See, while Herman’s construction company was quite small at the time, he dreamed big, in fact he wanted to build a megaproject, like a dam. Specifically, the Marshall Ford Dam, and he wanted the Federal Bureau of Reclamation to fund it. An aside: this dam would become part of a quiet war against the Texas public utility companies, since while it was supposed to be a flood control dam it was secretly going to be a hydroelectric dam, so it could be used to break the Texas public utilities’ monopoly on electricity.

So with the backing of the enemies of the public utility companies, they lined everything up just right to get authorisation with the Bureau of Reclamation, and with that pending they hurriedly started construction, with Herman Brown sinking $1.5 million into the project, putting him $500 thousand in debt.

And then one day Herman Brown found out that due to an Act of Congress, the Federal Bureau of Reclamation was forbidden to build dams on land it did not own. And the Federal Bureau of Reclamation did not own the land the Marshall Ford Dam was being built on. And according to Texas state law – state law that was effectively impossible to change because the powerful public utilities were wise to the scheme now and would never allow it – it was illegal to transfer in any way that land to anyone, especially not the Federal government.

The authorisations were dead, the dam was dead, and Herman was in debt for half a million.

Until a fresh congressman by the name of Lyndon B. Johnson used his White House connections and some complex political manoeuvres that we don’t have records of to blackhole any issues of land ownership or any of the many other inconvenient questions and got the dam authorised. And then of course re-authorised to add another $17 million to the budget to make the dam taller.

So because of Lyndon’s intervention Herman Brown had become a very rich man instead of a destitute man. And Lyndon followed this up by forcing the Federal Bureau of Reclamation to approve dozens of “change orders” to inflate the price of the materials and increase how much profit Herman Brown could reap from the project.

And Johnson would do this again for Herman Brown, on an even larger scale. In 1940 as the US was gearing up for war and building military bases across the country, Johnson made sure that any such construction would be done by Herman Brown. He made sure Herman Brown got a $100 million contract for what should have been a $23 million military base.

And Herman knew who his friends were, and would give Johnson anything he asked. Johnson didn’t just have a lot of money, he had more money than he could spend. Any money he could ask for, he would get.

And with this money, he was convincing the people of the State of Texas to vote for him. He was going to win the election.

Pappy

Now I need to tell you about an interesting character, W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel. Pappy was a radio announcer and a flour salesman who had a weekly show in Texas where he would preach about the bible and Hillbilly brand flour. His show had more listeners than any other in the history of Texas radio. It was said by a contemporary reporter that “at twelve-thirty sharp each day a fifteen-minute silence reigned in the State of Texas, broken only by mountain music, and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O’Daniel.” Pappy had the heart of the Texas housewife in the palm of his hand.

And in 1939 (two years before Johnson’s senatorial run) Pappy asked his audience if he should run for Governor. He received 54,446 replies in the positive. The three replies in the negative said he was too good for the job. He announced his candidacy.

The newspapers and political establishment took him for a joke candidate, just a crank taking the opportunity for a brief moment of attention. For Christ’s sake, the guy’d failed to pay his poll tax and wasn’t even eligible to vote!

In Pappy’s first rally he likely set a new record for the largest political rally in Texas at somewhere north of 10,000 people.

The first part of his platform was a $100 million per year statewide pension plan (four times the state budget) that would not be paid for with new taxes (when asked how he would pay for it, he would dodge the question with a song). The second part of his platform was to throw the “professional politicians” out of Austin: “If I am elected Governor of Texas, we will be the Governor of Texas –we meaning the common citizens, of which I am one.” That was his whole platform, besides scripture and songs revering old horses or mothers.

His rallies got bigger – 20,000, 30,000, 40,000. That’s larger than most Trump rallies today ¹. They followed him from town to town, “they barricaded the highway to force him to stop and speak to them.” And when he did speak the crowds stood, in sweltering heat or in thunder, hypnotised.

On election day, Pappy swept the vote. Third place in the race got 154,000 votes. Second place was 231,000 votes. Pappy reaped 573,000. More than the eleven other candidates combined. He was the new Governor of Texas.

Two years later, in 1941, Pappy had said he wouldn’t run for the Senate seat. In fact, Johnson had been so worried about a possible Pappy run that before announcing his own candidacy he’d confirmed with Pappy that he didn’t intend to run.

And then six weeks passed, and Pappy changed his mind. Pappy announced he was running for Senator. And Lyndon B. Johnson had a nervous breakdown which required him to spend two weeks in the hospital. The polls showed Pappy at a crushing 33% and Johnson at 9%.

But Johnson recovered from his “pneumonia”, and he came out of the hospital swinging. He decided to go to war.

He used his sway in the Federal Rural Electrification Commission to threaten rural leaders to vote for him. “If your box comes in for Johnson, you’ll get the [electrical] lines.” And if the vote did not come in for Johnson, they would not get the electrical lines. Communities that didn’t vote for Johnson would stay in a gruelling semi-medieval state. And those that did could have washing machines, radios, lighting, water pumps, electric stoves, refrigeration, and even fans.

Fort Worth’s leading figure wanted a number of federal projects. The price of those federal projects was support for Lyndon B. Johnson. Fort Worth voted for Johnson, and Fort Worth got its projects.

But Johnson couldn’t just use political power to get himself elected. He needed to be popular, he needed to match the kinds of rallies Pappy could hold. But Johnson seemed only capable of delivering speeches in a harsh, aggressive monotone and he had no draw. When he stepped up to the stage, the audiences started leaving, and he was barely getting hundreds to attend his rallies.

So he hired famous singers, a six-man band, blackface comedians, dancing girls, a twenty-four man “big band”, and the best master of ceremonies in Texas. He seeded the audience with men to cheer for him. He had giant revolving searchlights shot into the sky before each rally, beckoning the folk to come to the incredible “All-Out Patriotic Revue” that had been advertised in the radio and newspapers. It was simply a dazzling show, more extravagant than anything most of the poor Texas folk had ever seen.

Astonishing even to cynical Texas political observers, he began handing out free money in the form of defense stamps (which could be exchanged for interest-bearing bonds). This was ridiculed across the nation, with Time magazine calling the campaign the “biggest carnival in American politics”.

But it worked, Johnson went from addressing hundreds to thousands, at some point the State Observer in their description of a typical Johnson rally noted 15,000 in attendance.

But Johnson’s most successful tactics were more subtle. The State Legislature was struggling to pass critical appropriations bills and Pappy as Governor had vowed not to leave the State Capitol until the bills were passed and the session adjourned. So Johnson’s powerful lobbyist friends made sure that didn’t happen. The appropriation bills would not be allowed to pass, nor would the session be allowed to adjourn or recess, and Pappy was forced to stay in Austin. In one week alone Johnson’s allies defeated eight separate attempts to get Pappy out of the State Capitol. In fact, the 1941 State Legislature was to stay in session longer than any other in the state’s history.

As late as ten days before election day Pappy was still stuck in Austin. He was one of the greatest campaigners in the history of Texas, but Johnson wouldn’t let him campaign.

Not every vote for Johnson was purchased through such indirect means. In South Texas, there were five counties that might as well have still been in colonial Mexico. They were ruled by a patron or a jefe in a nearly feudalistic arrangement. The Mexicans – who didn’t speak English – didn’t understand anything about America or its governmental institutions, but they were dutiful voters. Because while they may not have understood what a Senator was, they did understand an unshaven pistolero herding them to the ballot box, giving them a pre-marked ballot, and getting a shot of tequila after they did their duty to the Jefe by voting correctly. And the dead would naturally vote the way the Jefes wanted, and so would the Mexican citizens across the border who would be trucked in on election day to cast their vote.

And the votes in these counties went to the highest bidder, and Johnson bid the highest, so they would vote for him.

But outside of these five South Texas counties, across the whole state, Johnson’s tactics and his money were pulling him into the lead. Week by week he inched forward until a week before the election Johnson topped the polls for the first time. And on the last poll before election day Johnson was at 31%, Pappy was at 26%, Mann at 25%, and Dies at 16%.

Nobody knows how much money Johnson spent on this race for the Senate. We strongy suspect much of it violated campaign finance law, but we don’t know for sure because the IRS investigation was squashed before it could get going. There’s one estimate that he spent half a million dollars, which would put him at ten times as much as a typical Texas political campaign of the time. And if he had asked for more, he would have gotten it.

Defeat

And on election day, the returns started coming in, and they were good. Johnson was winning, there were no surprises. The Jefes telephoned Johnson asking, “When do you want us to report the results?” and Johnson told them immediately, and dutifully they came in 90% for Johnson.

Now, Texas is a big state, and many counties are remote and don’t even have a telephone with which to report results. It could take a few days to get the results in, even if the urban and most of the rural population’s votes were counted on election day. By the end of the day, only 96% of the vote was in. But the remaining counties were all strongholds for Martin Dies (the commie-hating HUAC chairmain), unlikely to suddenly swing for Pappy. Johnson was leading by five thousand votes, a lead so substantial that the Dallas News reported that only a miracle could keep LBJ out. Even the Texas Election Commission used this “miracle” terminology to describe the possibility of Johnson losing.

But some of those counties that hadn’t reported in yet weren’t just delayed by their remoteness. They were delayed by the common practice of the county judge taking the ballot box to his home, unlocking it, and measuring and altering the results depending on who was paying him. And until the results were certified, a county judge could say he made an error and adjust the early returns. And among the many measures to prevent the verifications of these altered votes was arranging it so that the ballot box would be broken open in transit to the Election Bureau so that the results would fall out, making verification impossible.

But this was not a real risk to Johnson’s victory, because Johnson knew Pappy hadn’t made any preparations to buy any rural ballot boxes, and would have had trouble doing so even if he tried (since Pappy was against the so-called “professional politicians”).

And so Johnson celebrated. He bragged of his victory to his friends in the White House, and had a big party.

But see Governor Pappy was a religious man, and while he avoided taking any real political positions besides populist promises of pensions, he was serious about alcohol. Alcohol was a scourge, and as Governor, he’d been trying—and succeeding—to fill the Texas Liquor Control Board with crusading prohibitionist preachers. He’d already managed to fill one of the three seats, and with another he could fully control the board. And then he could “have just about ended the liquor and beer business down here”.

So the liquor lobby hated Pappy, but if he was Senator instead of Governor, then he wouldn’t be able to make nominations to the Liquor Control Board. Instead Pappy would be off in Washington, far away from the liquor industry’s interests.

And while Lyndon was making preparations to take up his new Senate seat, the liquor lobby quietly started buying up the rural county judges who controlled the ballot boxes that hadn’t fully reported in yet. And because Johnson had made the rookie mistake of reporting the vote total for his “bought” South Texas counties immediately, they knew exactly how much to change the vote by. If only Johnson had told his Jefes to wait, he could’ve had some votes in his back pocket if he needed them at the last moment. But he didn’t, so there was no reserve.

Late returns started coming into the Election Bureau, with the number dramatically reversed from the previous trend. Counties where the early returns had been strongly for Martin Dies suddenly shifted to heavily favouring Pappy. And other counties, which had submitted “complete” but not official tallies, started changing their totals to take votes away from Johnson and give them to Pappy.

Johnson scrambled to steal the election back, but his Jefes wouldn’t change their results since they’d already sent in “official” returns, and what Johnson strongholds were willing to alter their counts couldn’t do enough. And once they noticed Johnson’s efforts, the liquor lobby reacted by keeping certain counties in reserve to make sure they had the last move.

At noon, two days after the election, Johnson was four thousand votes ahead, and the slide began. Every hour brought bad news. By seven p.m., Johnson’s lead had been cut to a thousand votes. Later in the evening, five counties reported their official results and cut Johnson’s lead down to seventy-seven. And by the morning of the next day, Pappy was ahead by 1,311 votes.

Pappy won the election.

And Johnson lost not because his opponents were strong, but because his opponent’s opponents were strong. They wanted him out of the governorship, out of the state, and in Washington, as a senator, where he couldn’t hurt their interests. So they helped him win.

I read that it was common for students of painting to attempt to make exact copies of a master painter’s work as a form of practice. I’m sorta doing this here, this is a condensed/plagiarized version of a story from the magnificent The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro, which is the first book in a five-book biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Go travel! You just might fall in love with Japan or Paris or Bali and now you want to move there. And why not, it’s cheap, nice, and you hit it off with some locals, and it’s soooo much better than where you came from. Things aren’t so sh—tty all the time and you’re really happy. You’re seriously thinking about moving here.

Well, you moved two years ago, you’ve been taking language classes since and steadily practicing and you can mingle at bars and don’t struggle in the workplace.

Amazing, pat yourself on the back. Maybe you have a bit of an accent but you can still communicate and connect right?

Not really, you’re only 25% of the way there.

Everyone who talks to you can tell you don’t know the language and they automatically remove any richness from their speech and dumb things down. Maybe you can talk about complex and abstract topics, but you’re still deeply missing something.

Instead of slapping the back of their hand to their newspaper and exclaiming “they’re still f—king f—k us!” they’re not even going to bother because you just don’t know anything about this battle that’s been raging for the last ten years over extensions to the local transit system. You weren’t there man, you weren’t there celebrating when the construction program was announced, and you weren’t there when everyone’s income got .78% smaller to pay for it. You lack historical context.

Or you’ll be walking around at night with a friend and they’ll suggest someone is “an agent of chaos” and make a wild face in a reference to a 2008 movie that was very popular and you won’t get it and they’ll remember to keep it simpler with you in the future. You lack cultural context.

They’ll never seriously talk to you about their relationship with their parents because you just won’t understand. Oh sure they’ll make jokes and complain about how crazy their parents are and how much they wish they had parents like from your country. But when they need to come to terms with their upbringing they’ll lean on a local friend. You lack the shared childhood experiences.

Your coworkers will know how to read the subtle shades of workplace relationships and expectations, informed by decades of cultural exposure and their own parents’ grumbling, but your frame of reference will be too western to understand. Your values are wrong.

Perhaps your life failed to launch, and moving to a new country could genuinely help you restart from a difficult situation. And maybe the culture and weather really are that much better.

And of course there’s a special psychological jiu jitsu move you can do on yourself if you move abroad. Before, you subconsciously felt something was deeply wrong (that’s why you blew up your life to live in a foreign country). But now you’re an expat, so feeling like an alien isn’t a personal fault, you’re simply an immigrant! It’s expected that you don’t fit in. You don’t have to blame yourself, and neither will the people around you.

A lot of expats you meet abroad complain that the people are kind of closed off and it’s hard to make friends because the locals stick with their high-school friend groups. Or they say the people are friendly and nice, but there’s always a wall. It’s because including foreigners in a friend group is a painful experience. So you really must be offering something exceptional for people to put in the enormous effort to include you.

Even if you grind it out for thirty years, even if you study their culture maniacally and speak perfectly and know all the rules, every time they look at you they will instantly know, and they will treat you as an outsider. Just because you look or sound different.

You will always be Other. You will never be Danish, you will never be Brazilian, you will never be Indian, and you definitely will never be Japanese.

Go travel, see the world, fall in love with a foreign culture—then go home and be a local!

If you’re reading this and you’re not from a nice western country, don’t despair. America and Canada are much more accepting of immigrants than most other countries. Worst comes to worst you can stick with the large local immigrant communities. This post is targeting dissatisfied rich westerners who move laterally or downwards (in economic terms) because of alienation.

Also if you move abroad and marry a local, none of this post applies. You’ll still never be one of them, but a wife or husband is a solid connection, someone who is willingly signing up to play lifelong cultural interpreter for you. And with a spouse, kids, and coworkers, that’s basically all the social connection you really need!

And I’m definitely overstating the case here somewhat. But I feel that there’s an excess of positive sentiment around moving abroad, and I wanted to counter this with a dose of negativity.