For dragon enthusiasts
The basic recipe for writing a story about a character doing a thing is:
1) Establish why the character can’t do the thing.
2) Establish that if the character doesn’t do the thing, terrible other things will happen.
3) Have the character do the thing.
If you don’t answer the issues raised in 1 in 3, the story makes no sense.
Lost Horizon was a 1933 utopian novel. Not a whole lot happens, and most all of that toward the beginning. Once the inciting incident occurs, the rest is just talking, and since the story is told in the form of a flashback, there’s not a lot of drama. The story itself is obviously intended to be thought provoking, not exciting.
As I said, the ideas are more fun than the telling. Shangri-La is an impossible place where the rules bend. It’s majestic, exotic, and fun. The basic conflict is one of action vs repose. Is doing more important than thinking? In Tolkien terms, who has a more interesting story: Bilbo when he rests in Rivendell, or Frodo running about getting into fights? Hilton does a better job of making this complicated than you might expect.
The problems with the story are not a lot happens, the locals are basically scenery for noble Europeans and Americans, and wisdom is drawn from laziness. In order, there’s just not a lot that happens. No one does much. This is a big point, because the setting is violently predicated on Gotterdammerung and the doing of things is bad. Everything people do ends badly. War is coming, and we’re all gonna die. So the wise people do nothing.
I mean nothing, nothing, because the only shred of conflict is a love triangle that goes exactly nowhere.
The locals are scenery, meant to show the wonder of the white people. They do nothing.
In fairness, the white people don’t do anything either, see above, so at least it’s even-handed doing nothing. But a bunch of white people go to Tibet to do nothing, where the local Tibetans do nothing, and the story follows the white ones. The one character who does anything interesting on camera dies before you find out his name. He has no lines. Eh.
So the story isn’t that hot.
But I liked Shangri-La a lot. It’s a mystical city up by mystical mountains, and while my red-blooded self was looking for a few murders, the ambience of the story flowed over me like a warm wave. I enjoyed the reading. I liked thinking about magical cities in the mountains. There was an allure there, and I related to the characters if not their inactivity. Conway (MC) expresses very accurately what it’s like to go through something, and be done with it, and keep on living. He talks about the numbness, what can become laziness, and the way that seems hidden in wisdom. The points about the refugees from the WW1 trenches speak clearly.
I utterly reject the pessimism of the book. I don’t like the way they go seek out new experiences to be met by their own people. The whole thing is just too safe, and what might be the most exciting part, the escape from Shangri-La, doesn’t actually take place on camera.
It’s also one of these artsy books where they insinuate all the action, expose all the thought, and resolve nothing.
The book left me hungry.
Hilton obviously wrote from a perspective of being racially tolerant, and that’s fascinating to see. 1930s tolerant comes across very oddly today. I do wonder what 2110s will think of 2020s tolerant, and bet they’ll look as oddly at us now as I do at Hilton. It keeps the ego in check.
It could have been really good if the doer, Mallinson, made articulate arguments and wasn’t such a pointless boor. If the book was an actual battle of ideas, a dialogue like the Gorgias, or even just a meaningful conflict. But Mallinson isn’t really a character, he has only one emotion: frustration, and the bizarre love angle between him and Lo-Tsen could really use some flesh. The book reminds me a lot of Hemmingway, who I also frequently find unsatisfying.
It could have been really good if Chang had a motivation, a plot arc, a character, or anything at all really. If any of the locals did.
Lost Horizon is like reading a framing story about reading a book, where at the end the narrator puts the book down, loses it, and ends on the giant cliff-hanger, ‘does he find it again?’
I like dogs. Big, fluffy ones.
The day to day business of engineering is more fun than the day to day business of physics. The ideas of physics are more exciting than engineering.
In both you ask questions of the form, ‘Why is this the way it is?’
The physics answer speaks to the nature of creation itself.
The engineering answer is, ‘Because I did it with a different servo, broke six of them, and now I don’t have any left. But I found a stack of these suckers in a closet.’
“Do they have any weaknesses?” I asked the mystic ferret. “Are they scared of anything?”
“Yes,” said the mystic ferret. “They’re scared of being trapped in a burning house with a pack of hungry wolves while someone throws chainsaws at them.”
“Okay,” I said. “I have a plan.”
But everyone else said, “No.”
They didn’t even listen to my plan!
Is a dumpsterfire. How does it require 80% CPU to open a script?
Not run. Open.
And the profiler is violently wrong, often under-reporting time by orders of magnitude. In real world time, scripts take minutes, plural, to run. In profiler space, the function is listed as 11 seconds total time.
Financial professionals often lose sight of the people they serve. It’s a problem, but one not unique to the finance world. This filters down into the retail base, resulting in people who spend more time looking at the particular characteristics of the market right now than their own situations.
I fell prey to this many times.
When you’ve got enough money to dump into investments and savings, it’s easy to look at market valuations and so forth and decide to wait. Here are a few tricks to make sense of the proposition.
1) Would you actually be saving money by holding off a purchase, or are you about to waste it on stupid stuff?
An advantage to a retirement account is it’s hard to raid the account for stupid stuff, and frankly, I like buying stupid stuff. I could spend a lot of money on my car. Skiing isn’t necessarily an expensive hobby, but it can be. This exists.
So I look at the S&P and think to myself, a 50% correction is perfectly plausible right now. But whatever I throw in is not completely wasted, and I’m on a 30-60 year timeframe for retirement. Meh. The odds are good the market will come back, and they’re not nothing that the correction will hold off.
2) If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it now.
Markets usually go up. That’s why people use them. Even now in the era of madness, bubbles, and froth, they tend to rise. What’s more, no one can see the future, so we’re all looking at the same data, present and past. Many people are trying to time the market and they can’t all be right.
3) Are you playing to your strengths or someone else’s?
We all have the same data, present and past. But we don’t all have the same goals. A money manager can’t lose for five years. Their investors will take back all their money. I can’t get my money out of retirement for decades, so I might as well go long.
This also means that the importance of present and past data is lower for me, because the further ones goes out into the future, the more new present or past becomes meaningful. So if I’m looking at pulling cash out in 2060, 2040 will be old news then. It’s new past.
But obviously no one can predict that well now. It’s twenty years into the future! It only gets worse from there.
What I can control is right now, and if I’ve got some retirement cash right now, I may as well put it to work. Markets do generally rise. Even Japan is starting to come back. With regards to a worst case scenario, if I dollar-cost averaged into the Nikkei over the 80s, I’d be well ahead by now, even with the ’89 crash. (The Japanese stock market hit insane bubble heights in the eighties, crashed in ’89, and has not yet recovered)
There’s a chestnut floating around that you shouldn’t invest money you can’t afford to lose. This is absurd. I can’t afford to lose my retirement, but without investing it, I won’t afford to retire on it either. Obviously I invest money I can’t afford to lose. There’s no alternative.
I’m reading Lost Horizon by James Hilton. It’s the origin of the Shangri-La myth. I’d thought that was some ancient story, but it’s less than a hundred years old. The book is one where the story is more interesting than the telling.
I put my foot into something without explaining myself.
BLUFF: Improved fuel efficiency is good, all other things being equal. All other things are never equal.
On the subject of fuel efficiency, let’s arbitrarily confine ourselves to three areas.
1. User fuel consumption and emissions
2. Manufacturing fuel consumption and emissions
3. Whole life fuel consumption and emissions
You can do this a million different ways, but these are convenient.
1 is what I was talking about in the previous post, and it’s what most manufacturers advertise. It’s less significant than it appears. The ur-example is fuel consumption for a hybrid vs a pure ICE vehicle. The hybrid may get better gas mileage for the owner, but various parts need to be shipped, batteries produced, other components manufactured, etc. The hybrid may have better (lower) user fuel consumption/emissions (1) but worse (higher) manufacturing fuel consumption/emissions (2). In situations wherein much of the user level emissions are not controlled by the user, ie the power-generation mix of the power company, the advantages from an emissions perspective can be very complicated.
1 is fairly easy to measure.
2 is hard to measure and often kept secret.
3 suffers all of the problems of 2.
We can model 2 with the purchase price, but that’s not a great model.
From an environmental perspective, we want to minimize 3. From a personal financial perspective, we want to minimize (1 + cost of purchase). The government tends to increase costs on 1 to reduce total emissions, regulate 2, and completely ignore 3.
The point here isn’t that improved fuel efficiency is bad. It’s that one should be careful to be sure what one is evaluating is indeed what one thinks it is. See the tag line.
I kinda want to get some fish.