Taking a break like a normal working person (reflection)

A reflection is due at this time, mainly to help galvanize the mind a little bit.

During undergrad, I used to guilt myself for procrastinating on weekends. I knew that if I didn't get working on Saturday and Sunday then I'd suffer terrible last minute drama the following week. That's what it means to be a student. 

A lot of this procrastination could fit under the appellation "revenge procrastination," per the Internet definition, however, because the prior week had been so brutal. However, after having taken a gap year and stepping back into the intensity of the quarter system, frankly I think this is more akin to being a much needed break. Normal working individuals simply don't deal with this level of chaos and then are expected to marshal the resources to continue plugging away during the weekend, like immortals. Maybe I'm assimilating into the normal working adult pool, aka running out of steam; maybe I've started choosing to run steam slower. 

In my defense, I had headaches the last four days that forced me to slow down and take daytime naps. I worry that it's because I dived into a pool for the first time in 10 years and so kind of belly flopped and jostled my head, but it's equally likely that I just wasn't sleeping enough for consecutive days and just working with too much stark pressure on my body to an extent where my body was just like, Here you go, working guy, here's a headache. I didn't have much of a gradual on-ramp to the intensity. I went from an extensive low pressure, fully controlled gap year, to a day-to-day battle where every hour needs to be carefully penciled out. My brain and body naturally revolted on the weekend and put dynamite to my planner. I need to pick up my planner again after this post. 

As a grad student, I call this weekend "me taking a break." Completely guilt-free; it's what any sane older working person would do.

Somehow I've overbooked my schedule. I think I've made that mistake every quarter at this university except for the very first quarter. Every time, I vow not to repeat the mistake. But I think it's just that this place is super intense. 

I guess one thing I am excited about is that I still do have a clear goal in mind at the end of my tenure, and for the next few months I do have to call upon myself to do my best work without shying away from the challenge. So there's a bit of peace in that regard. 

Okay, it's 7pm and it's time for me to start my morning routine and clean up this mess of an apartment room. Cheers.

On notions of creative control and stability (reflection)

So I'm back to school now, and I'd say kind of the hardest thing to adapt to is sort of a feeling that I don't have control over my time anymore (though nothing has necessarily changed). I think it's mostly that being a student and being in the student mindset has the requirement that you must be "on" all the time, and after a year of taking a break from that, it's hard to get back into. 

At this point my plans are fairly set. I'm recruiting for jobs this quarter, and then come July 2024 I will move to New York. The problem is that day-to-day there's nothing super interesting me; part of that is that I've just transplanted myself back to this alternative environment. But truly, it's not like there's some kind of Netflix show or video game or hobby or something that is being used as my guilty pleasure to kind of balance out the day-to-day living. That might actually be because I cut my Vietnamese lessons down from 6 times a week to 1 time a week, and that was probably the hobby that was keeping me occupied. A great example of kind of the boredom rearing its head is that I woke up at 8am today, slept super well, fully rested, no headaches or funny business, but then I was immediately bored of being student so I scrolled on whatever addictive content Instagram fed me all the way until 1pm. 

So I think this necessarily elevates the role of this blog here, to give me a bit of sense of control and creativity while I go about my day-to-day, never day-off student life. Since writing a blog doesn't take up much time and it it's something where I am "progressing" or "making" in a sense. 

Letter to a friend making a bathroom finding app

I'm proud of you [Friend]! I think this is really great work. I see this vision very vividly, and it's one where the moat very clearly comes from your strengths in design. I mean, that's why I've never used let alone heard of an app that helps you find a bathroom. Because nobody's actually done this with any seriousness or talent.

This pain point has been very painful for me in the past, literally just for trying to do basic living, no different from being a local in Boston or New York. One time I basically invited myself into a private college building at Boston to pee, and it's not like California, so the security guard yelled his ass off at me, but ultimately I needed to pee so I just kind of did what I had to do. Then also in New York, it was literally impossible to be a human being because my cousin and I were always hunting for bathrooms. Sometimes you find a bathroom and it's "employees only" so even if you paid to be a patron you're fucked. I even tasked my Virtual Assistant with putting in hours to find bathrooms for me, but that was a failure.

I just think about how many parents suffer, and old people suffer, and how many people with chronic gastrointestinal issues suffer. And tourists who don't speak the area language suffer. And we haven't even gotten started on folks who are less privileged like food delivery gig workers and the homeless. This is applicable to so much more than just New York, Boston, and Disneyland.

[Other Friend]'s cousin lives in NYC, and she was a random +1's+1 to my big family's Thanksgiving last year, and when I asked her worst story about New York, she said she struggled to find a bathroom and almost passed out from the pain. I was like jesus I've never been in that much pain before.

I think this is a problem and solution space that is overlooked and yet can be very well scoped, and all of the success depends on execution instead of unknown risk, which is really rare. I don't know what your timelines are but I imagine you are doing this as a side project. I think also there is a potential here to eliminate the designer-needs-an-engineer chicken and egg problem because I am willing to commit to just implementing your design project myself. Sounds like it would be fun. It'd be my first project developing against a formal design spec. I can't start until Christmas break.

Lately, because I think I'm taking a hiatus on startups, I've been more into the notion of starting micro-software/micro-businesses in constellations as a way to scratch the startup itch. I wonder if it's more sustainable and successful that way, at least when one is early career. And basically the idea is that you have a bunch of ad hoc micro-partnerships with friends, etc., and that ultimately adds up into a lot of value creation, and also startup experience. I think I agree with Cal Newport's view that "being successful is really important because success begets success". So that's an argument in favor of micro-businesses rather than weird venture-backed hot air cargo cults. I think this is the kind of project where it would be a very successful first micro-business. It probably has more business value than it seems, and is not just a charity project. The quality of the app will probably stay higher if it has a business interest. I doubt this is the kind of project that can become a full-time job, but it does seem like one of these micro-businesses where you can put it in your pocket and start a pile of latent wealth / career capital.

Changed perspective on taking photos

I thought it'd be interesting to note my changed perspective about taking photos (of people, of trips). For the majority of my life, I subscribed to the idea that taking photos wasn't very Buddhist (to put it shortly), because you weren't living in the moment or seeing things with your own eyes. So I'd almost never take pictures of things, even of things that were pretty meaningful to me or very photo worthy. 

What changed is that I traveled solo for so long that I saw so much stuff that it was clear that a lot of memories will get lost if you don't take photos. It's not that 100% of the memory is stored in the photo. It's that you retain large portions of the memory deep in your mind somewhere, but you do need the photos to jog said memory. What also changed is that from traveling solo I started to realize that life is much longer than I thought it was, and so if life is that long you end up forgetting a lot of stuff, so it's really nice to have the photos to, again, jog your memory. I guess that's to say I shouldn't have been so judgemental of "older people" always being so eager to take photos at every moment, whereas I had seen myself as perhaps somehow arrogantly or smugly wiser than people years my elder by practicing what I thought was a greater degree of mindfulness. 

Here's the thing, though. I still don't let trips and events get consumed by taking the perfect photo. I kind of just do the "snap and run" thing, even if the photo is a little bit blurry. I'd still rather make time to experience to moment. But also maybe I should take some photography classes because a lot of these photos suck. I'm not sure how to balance these things out. 

I will say this. I love that AI and the falling cost curve of data storage totally increased your productivity on taking photos. Since it's so good at sorting your photos into timelines and search boxes, and also if you have duplicate photos it's just not important to delete them anymore. And the best feature that Google Photos etc. seem to harbor is that they surface these "memories" string of photos at the top of their apps each day. So you get to benefit from the nostalgia of a bunch of happy memories. In fact remembering happy things in your past is a free and extremely easy way to boost your day to day happiness, and I do think that is a Buddhist technique that has been described before. Especially if you're doing good or compassionate deeds in your past. So yeah, I guess taking photos is just a human thing to do! 

New York City reflection (September 19, 2023)

Okay, so this plane ride (EWR-LAX) that I’m currently sitting on feels longer (on my patience) than other long haul plane rides I’ve done in the last year of mega traveling. Part of it is that I’m not super inclined to pick up my Kindle and read some stuff because my head is already filled with a ton of stimulus after visiting NYC for the first time as an adult (I went once when I was 10). It was “only” 7 days but naturally I felt like I aged a year. This is pretty impressive because I’ve already done so much traveling this year, and this rate of learning and experience was competitive with or even surpassed some of the most intense moments of my Asia travels. Which is to say that NYC is a pretty unique place on Earth.

So that’s why I’m writing this reflection, because right now my brain is more interested in processing all the stimulus than adding new reading material stimulus. 

There was so much shit going on in New York that I’m not sure where to start. It’s interesting, that’s for sure. New York is like the mature big brother of Boston. It really does fit the caricatures whereby New York is Boston grew up and graduated college and is now experiencing the next level up in terms of personal growth and socialization and exposure. 

I am almost too scared to try to think back on the itinerary in a linear timeline right now, because it was so jam packed with experiences. 

So I took this trip from September 12 to September 19 with a second-cousin of mine, whom I will refer to as CS (Cousin-Second) for this writeup. I have a big family, and my mom and CS’s dad are cousins, and were really close growing up. So naturally some of that legacy percolates downward. Although that reminds me of Confucianism, it probably isn’t in this case. Just big family life. 

Also I’m hungry on the plane right now but there’s an hour and 20 minutes to go. So my writing pace will be a little bit slower or maybe less spicy or cogent than usual.

As you know(?), I spent 10 days in Boston in December of last year, and for half the time crashed on an airbed in CS’s apartment because she was going to school in Boston. That was pretty good traveling partnership, and CS kind of got to be a tour guide slash be a tourist in a city in which she had been studying for 4 years. I would say CS’s strength as a traveling partner is that she is chill and a homie who’s more often down for something rather than not (which is so great because people who are negative Nellies or require some coaxing can be so tiring sometimes). Like whenever I propose a trip somewhere as a half-joke (dragging along adventure) to CS, she just immediately starts looking for tickets. Even I don’t have that low of an activation barrier. 

Anyway, what was nice about this trip was that it was it was mutually productive, so it wasn’t like I was just going to be dragging my cousin along for a random trip. My entire family is on the West Coast, so actually CS is the cousin or age peer in the family with the most ties to the East Coast. So for her it was like (1) a way to visit friends in NYC, (2) a way to scope out the different neighborhoods of NYC to figure out where to live because her industry is concentrated in NY, (3) a way to push on to visit her friends in Boston afterwards. And so it was great because I like walking tours, but also I wanted this trip to be for me to decide whether I want to move to NYC (hard to do if you’ve never been to said place before), and thus I also had an interest in touring neighborhoods for housing, and also making sure I got to see as many sides of NYC as possible so that I can provide as fair of a judgement of the place in the little time that 7 days is. You don’t want your sampling to be too small and then draw the wrong conclusions out of ignorance. 

Okay, so plane lands on Tuesday night and we meet CS’s friend J for a late dinner in Chinatown. I loved how blunt the staff were in there, though actually after the whole trip I’d say most of New York is not as extreme on the bluntness (borderline rudeness) scale as that restaurant. Cute restaurant, though; it was in a cramped basement and all the walls were lined with photos and signed dollar bills. 

Our hotel was in SoHo, and only on the 4th floor.

For some reason, that first Tuesday night in SoHo and Chinatown the streets were super quiet, and so my very first jet lagged impression of New York was like, Err this is kind of underwhelming — This is not too different from LA and thus probably not gonna be worth it for me to leave my family and warm weather behind for this mediocre place. 

Also, sorry for another interruption, I recently promised myself that on this blog I’d switch over to more academic/English professor prose because I’ve been doing the Paul Graham “write like you talk” style for too long and I’m running a little bit out of practice on the academic prose style. So I might switch right here.

What I intend to say for how my NYC experience went, is that through the course of the week, my first impression was that this locale was underwhelming, then distasteful, then I gradually warmed up to the city once I saw parts of it that were more likable or interesting to myself (e.g. Brooklyn). And this trajectory was due to a coincidental convergence of a number of factors. Right, so for the first four days of the trip I was actually going through a recovery cycle of some headaches that were incurred prior to the trip. And headaches are simply not conducive to tolerating the stimulus of New York. The second is that I was staying on the 4th floor of a SoHo building on a very busy intersection, leading to some insane noise pollution. The third is that we had rearranged our itinerary to accommodate a show on Broadway on our first day in NY, but this meant that the first chunks of NY were all the most heavily touristy, commercial sections (i.e. Times Square and the disgusting monstrosities which surround it); so it basically replaced my underwhelmed impression of New York with a feeling of distaste. 

Ok plane’s landing. Peace.

Elementary school teachers (May 20, 2023)

When I was in third grade, my homeroom teacher was… not very inspiring. My mom insists that, whereas I seemed to have learned a lot in second and fourth grade, it wasn’t necessarily clear that I was enriched going to third grade. Part of this I can verify. The main memory I have of third grade is my friend and I sitting in the back of the classroom doing the next day or next week’s math homework, since class must have been sufficiently boring, and the lesson plans sufficiently easy (??). We also did a couple other antics, like come up with our own code language pooling together our small vocabulary of broken words of Vietnamese (we both had Vietnamese blood but neither of us spoke a word) to make jokes about the class; or draw comic strips and sell them during recess for $0.10; or effectively pass notes during class, but because we sat next to each other, we didn’t have to physically pass the paper and just shared a line sheet of paper between us and formatted it as an “Instant Messaging” chatroom. These are not antics disruptive to the class, just symptoms of bored students. I think our IM paper got confiscated by our homeroom teacher once, but she didn’t even make us read it aloud to the class, probably because the contents were so boring, or (to exaggerate this story) maybe said “I’m bored.”

By contrast, my second and fourth grade teacher seem to have been much more invested in my learning. Now granted, these were the kind of teachers who can be credited as, wow, totally responsible for sowing the seeds of my success and who I am today. My second grade teacher was a little bit intense, but because she cared about her students so much. I was a very shy student in second grade. She built up some of my confidence by telling me that I have the trappings of a “silent leader”, and coupled it with some tough love (constructive criticism) by telling me that I needed to raise my hand in class more. “Participate” was the magic word. Ooh, I can still feel the sacredness from hearing her say that word, and my mom repeating that word after the teacher-parent conference (I cried in the middle of the teacher-parent conference). In retrospect, I’m not sure whether “silent leader” is even a real thing, or if that’s just a thing a second grade teacher would say to a kid because second grade teachers are excellent at inventing magical words for everything. I really took it to heart nonetheless.

Distribution of businesses in NYC

Instead of clustering, they seem pretty evenly mixed. Probably because the transit means it's better to space your territories evenly as opposed to compete in clusters. Game theory something something. By this I mean eg non-Chinatown Asian food in the city.

California law proposal: limit on number of bureaucrats in all universities in CA

Part of why the tuition is so high is because the money is being lost to excess bureaucrats (see the book Bullshit Jobs). As tax-free institutions that receive significant government funding, universities should be more beholden to the people. A lot of these bureaucrats also create a bunch of pointless red tape in universities that makes going to school a lot more annoying. Just my $0.02.

I guess because I'm going back to my Master's it becomes so obvious to me how weird and broken it is that universities operate this way.

TIL first person tui vs mình ở Sài Gòn

Apparently they're congruent but tui is more popular these days and now the convention is to use mình sometimes with your partner. But you can still go around using mình and be fine. But since it's less often used it can sound just slightly more distant. Because the South prefers friendliness.

Update November 26, 2023: So turns out that you're never supposed to use tui, it's a kind of thing that the Mekong Delta people use. You can use it in colloquial with joking with your friends only, but never in writing.

Người thông minh chưa chắc đã hài hước

Người thông minh chưa chắc đã hài hước. 

Nhưng người hài hước chắc chắn thông minh. 😂

I think LLMs for education are amazing

I love playing Harry Potter Diarrhea Edition with my 10 yo cousin, a text game I prompted ChatGPT in the style of Sorcers stone

In my own a separate world, I took the characters from Methuselah's Children and started a planetary civilization, and we stole Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore and made him President. Then Singapore went to war with us. All of the prose is in English but all of the dialogue is in spanish so I can practice spanish

I went to Bangkok with Harry Potter

I talked to Hermione and Ron about the economist Bryan Caplan's views on open border immigration

I use ChatGPT every day

I think about the Virtual Assistants in the Philippines who I might teach to become more productive with the help of ChatGPT completely smoothing over their English difficulties

I think about the entire rest of the world who is trying to learn English and how it might enhance their productivity and understanding of western business context in this same way

I think about the personalized free tutor for every kid on earth, like this kid I saw in India who pushes a sugarcane cart

Gummy giò

Tôi: Còn "cơm với giò" vs "cơm ví giò". Tại vì mẹ em và cô em nói như vậy. Bà ngoài nói "cơm với giò" là đúng thôi, nhưng em chưa biết nếu "cơm ví giò" là từ nhanh của cả người việt hay của gia đình em thôi

Giáo viên: "Cơm dí giò" cũng là nói nhanh của người Việt

Tôi: Dí hay ví?

Giáo viên: Dí (/v/ —> /d/) 

Tôi: Đúng rồi chị tại vì ở lần đầu tiên em nghe "cơm dí giò". Khi em là con nít, tường xuyên em nghe "cơm dí giò". Vậy em và chị gái của em gọi món ăn này "gummy giò" tại vì giò trông có vẻ "gummy" giống "gummy bears" hay "gummy worms"

Giáo viên: Oh giống thiệt 🤣🤣

Someone on the Internet made our crochet ninja chick pattern

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/crochet-ninja-chick-pattern

It's really cool to see that something you put on your sleepy blog years and years ago was actually read by someone else and touched their life in some way. In this case, our author Cora Fan had created a crochet pattern for a ninja baby chick, and here is the photo evidence that someone else actually followed the pattern and made their own!

Back when we tracked data on pageviews, the "Crochet ninja chick pattern" blog post had been one of our highest viewed. 

The Internet has grown and matured in so many ways (i.e. social media) that it seems quaint to be pleased that someone benefitted from your blog, but it is pleasing!

Napkin consumption in Asia (story)

An instance in which I encountered culture shock while traveling through Asia was when I discovered a difference in habits around napkin consumption between me (an Asian American) and Asians. In America we have a lot of natural resources (especially per capita), a lot of paper plantations (and biogeography conducive to farming paper trees), and a culture inclined towards greater waste of materials (which can be explained largely in part by our natural resource availability). These three characteristics of America are simply not as true in many Asian countries, and so in America we treat napkins with a careless (carefree?) abundance mindset, but in Asia they are regarded much more scarcely.

For starters, the napkins in Asia are very thin, and they're not given out as freely. In Singapore, locals don't even use napkins. Every restaurant has a "basin" (sink), often separate from the bathroom, where you go to wash your mouth after eating. People just finish their meal, then wash their face and mouth at the basin. Even the Changi Airport mall had basins in the food court, near all the tables and tray returns, not like out of the way. It is a little bit of a culture shock because I'd never seen people wash their mouth in public, especially with such normalcy. I think because in America at the most you'd see someone wash their mouth in the bathroom sink, and so it's like a private or semi-private thing you do. And you know how rich and proper Singaporeans are, those businesspeople.

The thing is that I have an American habit of bite, then wipe. Bite, then wipe. But Asians eat and then wash at the end. 

Napkins, tissues are more expensive in Asia. They're thin, as mentioned, and they're also not nearly as soft. You often have to buy a personal pack at the convenience store, or pay a few cents at a restaurant to give you a pack. Or you might get exactly one tiny napkin with your dish served.

I feel like a wasteful monster because by the end of a meal I've used quite a few napkins but my dining counterparts have not even used napkins once at all. But it's not comfortable to have food on your face.  You know, it feels greasy and itchy and then irritates your skin. You might even get a pimple if you let it sit too long. I don't know whether the Asians just tolerate the food on your face feeling or whether they just have learned to land the food so perfectly in their mouth that it's not touching the rim of their mouth the way it is to mine. Frankly, I don't know. 

Restaurant staff are willing to be more generous with tourists like myself, because they know we North Americans like running through napkins. But through Singapore, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Korea, and Japan, you don't have anywhere near the level of napkin consumption you do have in America. 

Right, like in America, it's just normal to go to Starbucks and just "steal" for yourself 20 napkins from the dispenser and put it in your backpack, just in case. It's not even regarded as stealing or anything in the ballpark. It's just an Americanly habit. I recognize not every American does this, but I grew up with this being normal. I imagine American businesses might not necessarily appreciate this phenomenon on their books, but they know it's better business for them to be generous with napkins rather than being stingy. It's kind of the same thing with going to any drive thru in America where you ask for ketchup and the give you a million extra packets that end up in your kitchen drawer forever. It's this abundance mentality around these condiments and disposables, etc. 

It's just super handy to have that pack of Starbucks napkins in your backpack in case you need to blow your nose or clean up a spill. That's also why the napkins are branded, so that even if you take a glob from the store you're still promoting their brand wherever it is you're going. 

I just love this contrast, the American Starbucks visualization vis-a-vis what goes on in Asia. I brought this up with my Singaporean friend, a tech cofounder, while we were in his Saigon branch office. His perspective, naturally, was that America was the crazy place. He thought it was crazy that during his first trips to America, he'd see napkins blowing in the streets, like, "Wow! That's amazing!". 

That still leaves a very important question unanswered: How do the Asians eat spaghetti?!?! Without losing their sanity.

Got an MRI for the first time, this week

My dad told me it would be like "putting your head in a trash can and someone's just banging the outside of the trash can for an hour. I took a nap and got a tiny headache from the noisiness." I would agree with this description. It's not that eventful, you just hear innocuous sounds that you might find annoying if you were willing to lose your patience.

Aunt's recipe for Spaniard tuna on baguette slices

Ortiz White Tuna in Olive Oil

California white balsamic vinegar

Shallots (1 clove or 1 half or something)

Salt

Pepper

Baguette

Dump tuna into a bowl and break up with a fork

Add 1 tablespoon of California white balsamic vinegar, mix in

Mince shallots, mix in

Add a pinch of salt

Add an arbitrary amount of pepper

Let the bowl sit so that the vinegar can meld into the dish, wait time is the time it takes to toast a baguette

Preslice and toast a baguette

Ideas for improving the State of California (writeup)

“If California were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world.”

“California has a distinct cultural identity with regards to the United States.”

”California has 40 million citizens and has a lot of landmass, and thus is larger both geographically and by population than many countries in the world.”

These are a lot of the general consensuses on California, and yet the government of the State of California is not regarded with a lot of prestige by Californians, nor is there very much civic participation in the unique political issues that pertain to California and California only. (Part of this has to do with California being extremely far from Washington, D.C. and thus far from the center of government and civics culture in the U.S.).

If California has the trappings of a fully-fledged country, it should take itself with the seriousness and political identity of a country to the best reasonable extent possible. California has the wealth; educated citizenry and world-class educational institutions; single-party political system; preference for government proactivity; and cultural openness and inclination towards innovation for its state government and civics to solve its societal issues and improve standards of living.

Here’s a brainstorm of some of my ideas on how to improve the State of California. Please note that these are imaginative, early-stage ideas that warrant further research and citation and are not to be regarded as firm political stances by any means.

California improved civil service:

• “What if Google ran the DMV?”: Form a relationship between the CA DMV and the big tech industry to do a digital and UX overhaul of all DMV services. This will increase the public’s faith in the state by demonstrating that the state can serve everyday citizens’ needs without dysfunction; and allow big tech to get their foot in the door with modernizing government systems, hence ameliorating some of their antagonized relationship with governments in general, or currently absent relationship with the State of California in particular.

• University of California merit full scholarships provided by the state of California where you have to serve a tour / bond for 3 years in civil service after graduating. This would turn the prestige of working for the CA state government up, and force a lot of talent into the system. Tom Kalil says one of his biggest wishes is if there were more opportunities for talent to serve “tours” in government because this is an extremely effective tool. Here’s what I think, incorporating Kalil’s reasons:

  1. More talent is willing to consider it because they know it’s not permanent.
  2. Because it has a termination date, it forces the person to want to effect change faster.
  3. The person knows they aren’t tied to the bureaucracy so they can take more risk.
  4. There are many examples of this working in other countries, especially Singapore.
  5. This hasn’t been attempted at state level yet and may be politically winnable.

  It’s very much what Jennifer Pahlka and US Digital Service, Rewiring America, etc. are about, serving these digital tours. But it doesn’t have to stop at IT projects. The fact of the matter is that you just need more smart people going into the state government doing everything.

California YIMBY:

• Create a YIMBY-Pro Choice Housing Alliance in California: This idea is inspired by the following Ezra Klein quote: “I think of housing as basically the key to everything else in California. If people can't afford to live here, nothing else we do can really be just. Great climate policy in a housing climate that forces people to move to Texas isn't great climate policy” (source). Likewise, the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade casts a greater significance on which states Americans live in determining their civil liberties and abortion rights. In 2022 and 2023, California has passed a number of bills that make the state an abortion haven for out-of-state Americans, but the state can go further in this aim by reducing the cost of housing so that more people can afford to move to and permanently live in California.

• Pennsylvania I-95 emergency declaration but for California homelessness housing: The government of Pennsylvania recently made headlines this summer for its success in repairing a collapse in the economically vital I-95 highway in the span of only a few days, when experts predicted it would take them years to accomplish. This was largely attributed to the governor’s extremely strong emergency declaration that nuked any manner of red tape that stood in the way of the I-95 getting repaired. The state of California could declare an emergency that would allow it to yank certain housing projects completely out of red tape, if this example were studied more closely.

• Introduce the Korean fire escape model as a way to reduce California building code restrictions: A known issue with American construction that accidentally results in bad architecture (unlivable design) is that the building codes call for things that are well-meaning, pro-accessibility, good for emergencies (many things that are genuinely useful), but many of these restrictions cause bloats in housing costs and housing density (thus creating the “gentrified apartment structure”) that reduce quality of life. Building codes tend to require two huge emergency stairwell exits, among other provisions. But in Korea, they actually have fire ropes in every room instead. It seems to me that there are many inventions in other countries that facilitate emergency exit and thus enable architecture with higher livability.

California improved governance:

• Create think tanks focused solely on the State of California: Think tanks are an integral part of Washington, D.C. when it comes to policy formation and improved governance. Perhaps universities like UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC, and Stanford should have think tanks that do research and propose policy that improve effective governance in California or advance aims like Progress Studies.

• Form a state department or external nonprofit that hires the best civil servants from Japan, Germany, Singapore, etc. as consultants and invites them to teach the state how to run things better. This may be particularly good for mass transit developments, zoning reform, and civil service reform. This idea is inspired by the reputation of American governments tending to wholesale ignore the successful models abroad of governance (”America eschews copycatting to a fault”), whereby the simple solution is simply to actually try to learn what other governments do. The high-level argument is that California has a weird cultural history as a contrarian state to an already contrarian country (USA), and so may buck the US trend of bucking the trend by copycatting good governance examples from around the word. Further reading: “Why California Has So Many Problems”.

California industrial policy: These are initiatives for California to cultivate new industries in the state that ensure the state stays at the forefront of economic prosperity and dynamism. This is largely inspired by the United States federal government’s recent foray into more proactive industrial policy.

• Promote an education of the trades in the Cal State and community college system because there is a shortage in the trades. Instead of force an either-or situation between a college degree and a trades certification, someone should be able to get both at the same time. Hypothetically, college-educated tradespeople should also be more capable of starting new small businesses in the trades.

• Create an industrial base around phage therapeutics, a nascent field of precision medicine biotechnology that has the promise of helping solve the global antibiotic resistance crisis.

• Create an industrial base around biotechnology more broadly. Although California is already considered one of the world leaders in biotechnology (San Diego, Silicon Valley), it does very little as a state to ensure this ecosystem flourishes. The state could create new biotechnology innovation prizes, among other things that explicitly advertise California as the indisputable center for biotechnology innovation globally.

• Create a magnet program for Korean film industry talent to come and stay in California, thus maintaining Hollywood’s dominance in the global film industry for more decades to come.

• Create a California International Freight Standard: There does not currently exist an international standard for freight information and documentation, especially in a digital form. As a state that has the best tech hub in the world and one of the largest ports in the world, the Port of Los Angeles, the state would be capable of writing a sound international standard for conveying freight data digitally, in a way that private initiatives like the Maersk-IBM blockchain cannot, in the sense of kindling adoption of the standard.

• Acquire the Port of Los Angeles - Port of Long Beach complex: The Port of LA-LB complex in California is run by local county and city governments even though the complex is a strategic national economic asset. These local jurisdictions have neither the resources, the money, the incentives, nor the power to ensure these ports are upgraded and run smoothly, and this was demonstrated by the unprecedented port blockage in 2021. Washington, D.C. is too far away to really have a good understanding or control of the port even if they wanted (which is why the 2021 envoy was too little too late), but the State of California is close enough and large enough to manage these ports better in the interests of the California and American public, given that the port affects the entire economy.

California global health: These are initiatives for California to take a leadership role in global health. In this way, California is able to increase its international relevance beyond its current relationship to the world as merely a state within the United States.

• Create a campaign of doctors to lobby the state to incentivize the elimination of antibiotics in animal agriculture (mainly because this is breeding antibiotic resistance and causing humanity to run out of antibiotics for itself). This is yet another “sciencey slow-burn collective action problem” like climate change or pandemics that needs policies and R&D to solve. A campaign like this should first put some policy and science heads together and write a 15 year plan for the elimination of antibiotics in agriculture. The first step should be getting the state to fund R&D on new animal husbandry methods (HVAC systems, probiotics, DNA surveillance) that offset the need for antibiotics; fund R&D in cultured (lab-grown) meat; fund R&D in discovering new antibiotics or antibiotic technology to replace the ones we’ve lost. The second step is to introduce policies that subsidize these new animal husbandry methods to get them deployed affordably. The third step is to introduce a statewide tax on the use of antibiotics in agriculture because it is a negative externality, then put that money back into the R&D.

• Create a new branch of the California state government that is focused entirely on being a command center for public health and pandemic defense. In this way, California is better positioned to fend for itself when the next pandemic emergency happens. But also, California can be thought of as a regional leader or helping to coordinate the West Coast states’ response to a pandemic. California should be running pandemic drills (or “wargames”) to practice pandemic response, in the way that pandemic experts currently advocate for all governments to do. If California becomes a world leader in running pandemic drills, it will likely form relationships with other governments, domestic and abroad, to teach and coordinate these systems. This new pandemic department of California should function like the U.S. DARPA in that many civil servants serve “tours” for a few years in this department. There can also exist a state-related external organization of citizen volunteers, or “civilian corps”, who help maintain California pandemic readiness (public-private relationships, media relationships, supply chain logistics) over a long period of time, like a “firefighter brigade,” “national guard,” or “standing army.”

Useful links relevant to this blog post:

• “The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read”
• “Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in government”
• “Trump and Kim Can Learn a Thing or Two From Singapore” (archive)
• “More on Singapore and public sector talent development”

Favorite Chuck Norris jokes

- Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

- Chuck Norris doesn't sleep; he waits.

- Chuck Norris can divide by zero.

- A cobra once bit Chuck Norris. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.

- Chuck Norris can touch MC Hammer.

- Chuck Norris can win a game of Connect Four in three moves.

- Chuck Norris knows what Willis was talking about.

- Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird.

- Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.

- Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

Dr. Seah’s Bangkok food recs

https://maps.app.goo.gl/94ScxRVod9QP7xKL9?g_st=i

Rung Rueang Pork Noodle (Left Shop)

+66 84 527 1640

Best street noodles

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZZxfmS77YHK6TCav6?g_st=i

Sabaijai (Original)

+66 2 714 2622

Best all around solid Thai food (get lime soda and the lime fish and the deep fried larb)

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SwQDgfYo6jQR41oH6?g_st=i

Sri Trat Restaurant and Bar

+66 2 088 0968

Fancier Thai food but the best crab curry in the world

Planning a transition from Blogger to Posthaven

Blogger is just looking super crusty these days, and I think I'll have better enthusiasm for writing if I'm writing on Posthaven. The problem is that there currently exists no solution for the migration. The manager of Posthaven has said they are too busy to work on a migration tool from RSS at the moment. So it may be in order for us to do a migration using some Python automation script. I'd like to use ChatGPT and the newest LLM coding tools to see if it makes it easy to write. The thing, too, is that I'd like to preserve a lot of the images, comments, and html embeds we have from this space on Blogger, since it makes sense to preserve things for posterity because this is mostly a posterity blog. So it might be required to have our bot/script click buttons to recreate the comments in the comment sections of the blog posts, or at least concatenate the comments to the bottom of those posts to preserve them. 

Oh yeah, the other benefit of Posthaven is that I'll be able to have more blog posts with images, since in Blogger the image upload size limit is so lame and blurry it's not even usable. And I think having some images is nice and adds to the momento effect, or even allows me to upload some photos from life again, and depict physical creative works.

Learning Vietnamese: two-headed words

Naturally, one thing rewarding about learning languages are the little Easter eggs you discover about the language that you'd never expected could be possible in a language before. The fun one I want to talk about today with you folks is that there are a lot of words in Vietnamese that have a "space" between them (or kind of like a compound word in English but not quite), and if you splice the word and only use either the first or second word, it has the same meaning. So the word will be like "A-B", and all the combinations of the word that are identical will be like "A", "B", and "A-B." 

We kind of have this in English where we have "because", and in vernacular you can remove the prefix and go with 'cause. But also in Vietnamese it's not just vernacular but official grammar. To try to grok how fascinating this is, so now imagine if you could also use be' for because in English. And so you'd have "because", be', and 'cause. And there are a lot of words like that in Vietnamese. It's just a really beautiful thing. 

Methuselah's Children (book)

Methuselah's Children is about Earth a couple centuries from now where there is this secret society/family of humans who have very long lifespans because they married other people with long lifespans, so now some people live to be 200+. And, unrelated, Earth at this point has mostly figured out how to be peaceable as a whole civilization. But the fact that this clan has revealed themselves to the public starts to spark social and political unrest and threatens to disrupt enlightened peace. So the book is less about the individual protagonist (though it does focus on characters) and more about this social situation is going to resolve itself at a high level. Kind of like other sociopolitical sci-fi. 

I'm enjoying this as a page turner. Miller recommended this book to me because she read it as part of a book club. I'm also used to Heinlein's writing style from having read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And I might have raved before on this blog what a good, heartwarming book TMIAHM is. Part of what makes Methuselah's Children a page turner is just that I am compatible with Heinlein's prose, where for me it's the right level of stimulation. And the story (I'm 40% through) keeps moving at a reasonable pace without anything boring.

I do like that the protagonists' competence is largely attributed to just having lived on Earth for a long time. E.g. they can negotiate their way around tricky situations simply because they have a lot of life experience. To me, that's interesting in terms of framing or imagining what it'd mean to live 200-300 years as a human in a world where everyone still lives to 70-90.

I also like that, on the politics side of the book, you kind of have the President of the mortals as an intelligent, reasonable person who's just trying to do their best given the situation of mass politics. Heinlein depicts Earth as having reached a fairly advanced state as far as people being intelligent and reasonable; it's kind of utopia-like in the level of peaceful order they've achieved. That premise sometimes makes some sci-fi books enjoyable because the author can't just write a story where bad things happen as a mere consequence of people being stupid or shortsighted in a violent way (aka like Putin invading Ukraine is kind of pointless but it's because he's stupid not because he isn't cunning but because he lacks wisdom about... the meaning of life). 

It was great to pick this book up on my Kindle because lately I'd hit a rut where I found no forms of entertainment interesting. It just goes to show that you should keep trying all kinds of books because you never know which one is going to hit you at the right moment to spark some intrigue in you. 

At the 40% mark of reading the book, I'd give it 7.75 out of 10. Pretty good, easy to read; I've only gotten bored once but not enough to make me quit the book. I'm still reading it. It's easier to read than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Miller’s Sriracha Salmon Recipe

recipe: 

the marinade is just 1/4 cup of sriracha + 2 tablespoons of honey + a generous amount of garlic powder 

then you salt the salmon generously and dunk in the marinade (you don't have to let it sit just make sure they're fully covered)

then air fry at 390 for 14 mins till they look like they're a lil burnt (but they're not)

Combinatorics of language learning

Let's say that your native language is a language other than English. Since English is the most widely spoken language, the market for learning materials for languages is probably biggest in English. 

I bet there are resources for learning Korean in Spanish, but I'm willing to bet they're not as plentiful as those for learning in English. Now, Spanish is a hugely spoken language, so I'm sure there's more than enough material out there, but how about starting from a smaller language? How many resources are available for learning Spanish in *Korean* (the opposite direction)? Probably still good enough, because Spanish is a big language. But I imagine more Koreans are trying to learn English than Spanish so there's less material. 

But how many resources are available for learning Amharic in Korean? Can you find an Amharic teacher who will teach you Amharic in Korean? Most languages have at least a million speakers, so it's possible, but I imagine harder to find than an Amharic teacher in English, or an Amharic textbook in English. 

What I'm getting at is an interesting thought I had whereby I think maybe a lot of folks have to learn English before learning another language, especially for that language is less widely spoken or very niche. It's almost like English is a stepping stone or a hub for jumping to one of these smaller languages? Because otherwise you have this crazy combinatoric issue where every language needs to be available to be taught every language. And this is obviously not the case for languages for small ethnic tribes, etc. I don't expect to find a Navajo teacher in Vietnamese, and I bet it's easier to learn Basque in Spanish than in Swahili.

 

Is this all true? I don't know; I'd love you to tell me! 

LLMs like ChatGPT, or good old fashioned Google Translate, can help this issue, I think, but of course there's so much more to learning a language such as speaking practice or cultural experiences, to name a few examples.

This is Joy / Human of Seoul (story) (May 2023)

This is Joy, an Ugandan lady I made friends with in Hongdae, Seoul. She went to college in Korea and stayed for work and has been here for a total of 7 years, and plans to remain another 2 years. So she's fluent in Korean.

Joy is from a poor family of a remote village in Uganda. She is fluent in English because Uganda was a former British colony and it's the language used for all formal matters in Uganda, including going to school. She studied Accounting in high school. 

Maybe 10 years ago it was very easy to get a visa to Korea whereby you come to Korea and the Koreans will teach you to speak Korean; and then you get a university student visa; and then you get a looking-for-work visa; and then you get work visas from employer sponsorships. Most Africans didn't know about this Korean opportunity because they're more interested in coming to the US or UK and have very little awareness of Asia. They don't know about rich Asia/Korea and just think Asia is China, and ew "nobody wants to go to China." The only reason Joy knew about Korea was because her older brother went there first. He went to uni in Kenya and his roommate happened to be Korean, so one day the Korean roommate brought him to Korea and he loved the place. He is now married to a Korean woman and has 2 children. "There's a trend of Korean women liking African men."

Many countries from the third world have people who want to come to Korea because they can make so much money and send it home to their families. Including African countries, but a huge number of southeast Asian countries, incl Vietnam. (Many Vietnamese foreigners in Korea). 

Most likely Korea is just offering student visas to poor countries as a form of diplomacy/charity like most rich countries do, but I think it's interesting to consider this in the context of Korea's declining population, where they need young immigrants to help support their economy and pay all the old people's pensions. Ideally you'll want young immigrants who can speak Korean and have a Korean university education so they can assimilate into your highly organized society. 

But according to Joy these students don't really care about the university education, because it's costing tuition, and more importantly it's costing you hours out of the day where you could be working full time instead of part time in Korea. Because there's such a huge opportunity for them to work in Korea and send boatloads of money home to their families. "You can make much much more money as a cleaner in Korea than as a nurse in Uganda." So she works as a cleaner for an Airbnb business and 1 hour a day as a cleaner for a dance studio. 

Today it's much harder to get a student visa to Korea because too many of these foreign students from poor countries would drop out of Korean uni and become illegal immigrants so they could make money right away instead of have to go through uni. Therefore Uganda is currently blacklisted, and so is Vietnam and some of the other southeast Asian countries.

Joy did not drop out of uni, but instead stayed legal and picked the easiest major possible: art therapy. The private college she went to is also slightly corrupt. Some Korean citizens realized they could start a business by creating one of these degree mills for these foreigners from poor countries, where you only go to class once a week and don't actually learn anything. That way you have more hours out of the week to work. So that's how she got her degree, which is legal. 

It's obvious to me that the remittances Joy can send home may very well be life changing money for her family, so I asked her, "What's the biggest help you've been able to have for your family by being able to send this money home?" She said, "Er… eat food. They depend entirely on me right now. (2 parents 4 siblings back home). I'm kind of like the big boss 😂".

She's been home 2x in the last 7 years, but it's not fun coming home anymore because her extended family will be haranguing her for money and gifts each time she comes. It's still fun to see her parents and siblings. She calls her family every day, often even while working. 

As an African in Korea, she puts up with a lot of racism. When she first moved to Korea she tried to start conversations with 2 of her neighbors every morning, but they always pretended to be in a rush. At some point they would wait to open their doors until she got far enough away. She gets a lot of questions from Koreans about her hair, like one time from the old lady she buys lunch from every day. The old lady also used to dislike Joy. But the old lady's daughter, who is likely educated in these things, told her mom not to ask Joy these questions anymore. So she doesn't, and is always happy to see Joy every day. 

Still, after 7 years in Korea, Joy does not have a single Korean friend. "They're fake, fake smiles, and they ghost you." She's only friends with other foreigners, like Mongolians and Americans. "American English teachers and military. It's so easy to make friends with Americans, because they're always so open and down to vibe. Like you. I can make friends with any foreigner on the street but I can't make friends with a Korean. If I tried to make friends with a Korean the way I made friends with you, they would not.

"I don't care about establishing any friendships in Korea, because I can't get citizenship here, so the day will come when it's just me and my luggage anyway. What I like most about Korea is that it's safe, and that people don't steal things. I got tired of my country: so much corruption, we have a dictator, I got tired of not having work in Uganda. I don't find it hard to live in Korea because the racism doesn't bother me. I'm just here to make money."

=====

She said the first time she heard someone speak Vietnamese it sounded like cats 🐱 🐈 🐈‍⬛ 

Meow meow meow meow

Tắm mưa ☔️

Bây giờ tôi buồn ngủ, những mà tôi không đi ngủ. Tôi không biết tại sao. Hôm nay tôi học trời nào và mùa nào. Tôi nghĩ hay quá tại vì có giao tôi nói ở việt nam, người thích tắm mưa. Nó bình thường.

Gmail

The ubiquity of big tech is mind blowing when you realize everyone on earth uses Gmail. Go to Vietnam and everyone's using gmail. I bet if you went to Croatia or Ethiopia it'd be that way too.

Amazing Singapore government talent insight

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/more-on-singapore-and-public-sector-talent-development.html

Some feedback from dance class today

I did a drop in with my friends since we used to dance together in college. "Kpop level 3", my first time doing a kpop dance class. Since the class was small, I got some good constructive feedback from the teacher on how to improve, that can probably be applied to all of my dancing. I'm writing it here so that I have it as a notes/reflection for self improvement.

1) It looks like I'm spazzing to rush to catch up to the moves (choreo), but if I just anticipate the moves ahead of time then I don't need to rush. So this is some combination of stop dancing panicked cause it's messing with the kpop style plus preload some of the next moves ahead of time in my brain.

2) The last moves of the piece we learned are kind of like freestyle, but basically I completely let loose and don't even do something that's in line with the style of the choreo, so it probably looks messy. So at the end I should do something that isn't messy. Truthfully, it's because by the end of the piece I've completely forgotten where in hell I am and so I just start spazzing freestyle, so it kind of coincides, but maybe I should have more control for "fake it" blank memory scenarios.

I'm sleepy today (reflection) / TIL Vietnamese -ui vs -uy

My dog, who is healing from an injury, escaped from his pen (meant to limit his activity) and climbed up the stairs, for the second time. He wanted to hang out in my room, so I was willing to grant him asylum. Except the only problem is that he started complaining at 4am, and so I had to carry him all the way back down the stairs and put him in his pen. And now I am sleepy today. I would say I am not very robust against sleep disturbances or deprivations. It's very easy for one off day to ruin the workweek. So here I am, up groggy around noon, but I'm still going to try to make the best of the work day today. 

I've been learning a lot of Vietnamese lately, so here's a factoid: words that end in -ui vs words that end in -uy have slightly different pronunciation. Note that in Vietnamese the "i" and "y" sounds are the same. But here comes the rule: If a word ends in -ui, you put emphasis on pronouncing the u for a longer period of time, and if there's an accent mark (always written over the u per Vietnamese spelling rules), you use it on the u. But if it ends in -uy, you put emphasis on pronouncing the y for a longer period of time, and if there's an accent mark (which will always be written over the u), you use it on the y.

Inspirational link on micro-saas success

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36786480

It just felt very wholesome!

Subtle differences for English phrase “got it”

Gotcha = Got it! = "I understand" [happy tone, but the happy tone is a requirement in a work context] 

I got it = "I understand and I'm annoyed that you assumed I wasn't smart enough to know already, or I think you’re talking too much" [This is used to be passive-aggressive at someone you don't like]

Got it = I understand [neutral tone for friends/family, impolite at work]

Macbook + iPhone new continuity camera feature autoconnect was annoying

Every time my iPhone would get close to my Macbook, it'd start making a weird womp noise, so I needed to shut it off. Here's the solution:

"Remove the Continuity Camera feature: on iPhone to go General > AirPlay & Handoff > deselect Continuity Camera"

Source:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254349417

Figma: Keyboard shortcut to show transition arrows

The shortcut is SHIFT + E. I always try to Google this when I forget, but then the results show me how to draw graphical arrows instead of how to show the prototype arrows. These are the transition arrows that help you tell Figma in what order to play your slides in the slideshow. 

I don't believe the transition arrows are relevant for the PDF download. I'm not sure.

Here's the reference link in case you need it: 

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411431245335-View-prototype-connections#:~:text=Use%20the%20shortcut%20%E2%87%A7%20Shift,connections%20related%20to%20multiple%20flows.

New perspective on economics at home in America

After coming home, now I'm astounded by how expensive it is to buy cooked food in America. Every other continent on Earth has more people so you can buy from a restaurant affordably or which a certain confidence that like, cooked food *exists*. It really speaks to the reality that America is still the frontier land of the world in that the population density is still so low.

Sobre el fin de semana (actividad de ejercicio como usando un bote en la playa)

Pues, este fin de semana fui a la playa con mi familia para hacer ejercicio en un bote. Pero no es un bote, solamente no sé la palabra que necesito que describir la cosa. Es una invención como un monopatín o algo para esurfear, pero está usado como un bicicleta y no es un bote en realidad. Lo siento porque yo no estaba practicando mi vocabulario. 

Y hoy hablé con dos amigos míos separados por el teléfono. Mi amigo que es más viejo que yo piensa que debo regresar a la universidad como la decisión en que yo debo hacer próximo. No sé si estoy de acuerdo, pero es la verdad que ahora no tengo mucho dinero porque usé mi dinero para viajar por los países asiáticos. Entonces es importante que busco un trabajo. Especialmente si quiero vivir en Nueva York y hacer mi hogar allí.

Cheesy movie theater content

Real talk: Why are the ads and content before the movie in the movie theater always so… cheesy? It's been like that my entire life and I've always wondered why they can't seem to figure out basic taste.

Notes on Korea “the enigma”

Truth be told, I found Korea / Seoul to be quite an enigma. 

The country it felt most similar to was surprisingly Singapore. Kind of like Singapore + land + history. Seoul was absolutely spotless.  

I think Irvine and Seoul have a lot in common. Seoul felt like Irvine blown up into a New York City scale. 

The people were always very helpful, just not exuberantly expressive.

The standards for dress were both intimating and impressive.

I felt apologetic with a higher frequency than usual. Part of it was not fitting in, but the other part was that so many of the service jobs were filled by Korean elders (interesting artifact about their economy), and because my age rank is so much lower in Asian society I always yearned to give them a lot of respect. 

Algunas noticias de mi vida

Pues, las tres días pasadas he estado haciendo mi cuarto. Entonces mi cuarto estaba desordenado. Pero tengo la confidencia que voy a terminar pronto.

Hoy es un día bello del verano y mi familia y yo estamos yendo a la playa para andar o escalar.

También recientemente yo ayudaba a mi hermana menor con buscar apartamentos porque ella empieza una nueva universidad. Pero es solo una hora y media cerca de nuestro hogar.

Hôm này tôi đi bác sĩ

Tôi đã đi tại vì tay tôi ở bên trái bị không tốt. Bị đau bảy ngày trước. Nhưng mà mọi ngày tay tốt hơn.

La meta mía en este momento

Porque he regresado a casa finalmente, después de cuatro y medio meses de viajar, ahora tengo una meta en que quiero que yo haga una rutina diaria. Porque ahora yo duermo tarde y me levanto tarde, y es un hábito un poquito malo. Por ejemplo, ahora son las dos de la mañana. 

Necesito más disciplina porque tengo que organizar la dirección de me trabajo. Buena noche.

Rebuttal where Trevor Noah talks about the benefits of traveling

https://youtu.be/xwI3IW9wES0

New Yorker: The Case Against Travel

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

TIL cũng được

Cũng được means "good enough," or "this'll do." You can use this when talking about food or about anything really. It's funny because in Vietnamese there's more liberty to be a food critic, whereas in English if your friend cooked for you and asked "how's the food?", if you said "cũng được," it'd come off as impolite!

TIL “bác” usage

TIL in Vietnamese the pronoun Bác is a title that can be used for either a man or woman. For some reason I thought it just meant a man who's between ages ông and chú. I still haven't fully figured it out, but it's now on my list to study further.

New perspective on foreign English accents (story)

Lately after traveling, I've gotten some new perspective on foreign accents from people for whom English is a secondary language. I always used to take it at face value; basically I didn't give it that much thought in any direction. I just used to think, Okay, maybe this person has just accumulated some mistakes in their pronunciation from when they learned English, or something something lost neuroplasticity there are some syllables in English that aren't part of their native tongue, and now that they're an adult it's harder for them to acquire these syllables. Shrug.

I think all of this is still true to a large extent, but what deepened in my perspective is that as I've tried to learn other languages, I see things from a more linguistic perspective. The accented or at times slightly mistaken English someone is speaking is a beautiful blend of their native tongue and English. I went on a guided tour in Osaka, and my tour guide was a Spanish scholar of Japanese history. He was born and raised in Mexico, then studied in Spain, then moved to Japan to do research, where he now lives with his Japanese fiance. His first language was Spanish, second language English, third language Japanese. The tour was in English, and it was stimulating to hear his pronunciation of certain English words using the pronunciation of the Spanish alphabet, such as the short 'a' where in English we might use the long 'a'. Another one of course is the mishmash of cognates and/or borrowed words between English. So when he said the word "vegetables" in English, it came out as a lovechild of the English "vegetables" and the Spanish "vegetales": He said "vegetals".

In many parts of the world that aren't the U.S., emphasis on learning to speak English is less of a hegemonic, colonial sin and more of a true lingua franca for modern life and modern business. And not just to do business with or "serve" the West. When the Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. visit each other's countries, they most often use English to communicate. Because speaking a foreign language is hard, but chances are both strangers studied English in school. As a native English speaker, it's an interesting phenomenon to observe, because both strangers are speaking in different versions of accented (and often, broken) English to each other, and yet it works.

You get some beautiful English-Japanese linguistic blends in Japanese, too. Because the public education system has put a strong emphasis on learning English, you get a pop cultural phenomenon whereby the English version of a word is assimilated into the language and used by the younger generation until it sticks. I was surprised that in Japanese, a table is a "teburu", a toilet is a "toire", a shirt is a "shatsu", a card is a "cardo". McDonald's is a fun one: "Makudonarudo" when the full name is used. So now you can see how when a Japanese person goes to speak English in America, they might ask for the toilet in a way that sounds like completely mysteriously broken English pronunciation ("toire"), but in fact it's coming from a cognate effect with a word that is completely valid and common in Japanese.

I saw this in Vietnamese, too. TV is "tivi", chocolate is "sô cô la".

Now when I hear foreign accents, I think less about how the person might be "mad-struggling" in English, and more about how there is linguistic and cultural depth to the slightly different vocalizations they are making.

TIL Pokemon board game Ubongo

I bought my little cousins some souvenirs from the Pokemon Center DX in Tokyo, one of which was a Pokemon themed version of a board game called "Ubongo". Kind of like a manipulable Tetris with cardstock but with a different goal, you race to fit the shape pieces into the template card you're given. 

In particular I focused on finding souvenirs that could be found in Japan only. I guess I assumed this was a Japanese board game, but I think it might have just been a corporate partnership. Granted, the box was in Japanese and the label on the outside says "for sale in Japan only", so I did achieve my goal. I mean the art on the board game and the box are still remarkably original and beautiful.

The game was fairly satisfying. Little super cousin "Bella" (not her real name) and I had a board game night to ourselves. We ate takeout pho. I made sure to blanch the pho noodles within 10-20 seconds so that they wouldn't get mushy, which I've done in the past. 

Hôm này tôi ở bên Mỹ

Hôm này tôi ở bên Mỹ, và tôi sẽ nấu ăn trứng khuấy cho ăn sáng. Bây giờ tôi không muốn ăn món ăn Châu Á tại vì ăn nhiều rồi bốn tháng.

Cũng hôm này tôi sẽ chạy ở ngoài và làm việc tại vì tôi không làm hai cái trong nhiều thời gian. 

Chúc bạn sẽ có một ngày vui hôm này.

Summer camp, elephant showers, and hunger pains (story)

I went to my first (and incidentally, only, considering it was so late) sleepaway camp when I was 16. It was hosted by a university an hour away, and it was for STEM kids.

I was physically nervous upon arrival. I didn't fall asleep my entire first night in the dorm.

That first day, especially, there were just a bunch of kids running around on the grass doing the summer campey, running-around games? I guess you'd call it the cousins of capture the flag, but which are annoying because it's like, ugh, what are the rules for this one? I guess because it was already mid-game I found it not-fun because you're sort of throwing yourself into the fray and you're pretending to chase after the frisbee or whatever that everyone else is chasing after. So that you don't look stupid and also get some exercise. But in truth you have no idea which team you're on or what the hell you're supposed to be doing.

For beautiful tangential context: You know at Disneyland when there's the parade and they want you to get up and clap your hands, and jump, and dance, and chase the confetti, and chase the rubber balls they shoot out of the float? When I was a kid, I just, naw, I never did that. I preferred to just observe. Like I never really understood other kids' and other people's needs to do the novel physical activity. I guess some of that still rings true for me today. I went to Phuket recently and went to visit an elephant sanctuary, and they had this activity for tourists to shower with and wash an elephant. Or like feed an elephant. And just like, I don't have an interest in having the "experience" of brushing the elephant under the shower, or even my hand being the one necessarily giving the banana to the elephant, because someone else is doing it anyway. I can just observe vicariously; like I don't see what's so exciting about "me" or "I" in particular having done the activity. I don't get like what exactly people are trying to "win" or "check off" their bucket list?

Once I got used to it, summer camp became less cringe and the month I spent there still constitutes one of the happiest times of my life thus far. Nonsarcastically. The End.

Honestly, the thing that was more annoying was that I used to have these growth spurts combined with a demanding metabolism (neither of which ultimately yielded an impressive height) where I'd just have to eat so damn much, not because I enjoyed it, but because otherwise I'd be so hungry I wouldn't be able to do anything else or my stomach might even have mild pain. This phenomenon continued all the way through to the end of my first year of college. That's actually how I made a lot of friends during freshman year. I'd have to eat so much food that the first group of friends I was eating with had already finished and left, and so I'd get another helping of food in the dining hall and sit down with a completely new group of strangers in order to have some company. Life hacks? I dunno.

TIL US Global Traveler card

TIL that if you are registered on the US Global Traveler program, then upon reentry to the US you don't need to have your Global Traveler card on you. You can just scan your passport. I wonder if it was always like this. Anyway, it's super convenient because while I brought my passport abroad, I didn't pack my traveler card. 

Global Traveler is great, and it saved me a line of like 100-200 people going through CBP today! 

A country’s snacks as gifts, pt. II

I think I accidentally became a shopaholic in Japan, because their internal consumer market is so vibrant. It's really remarkable, and unexpected. I usually have a very high threshold for buying things, but I am such a sucker for the fact that the Japanese put tasteful art on literally everything, including their consumer products.

You'd assume, given how globalized our world is, that these goods would easily already available on Amazon or something, but they're really not. There's a lot of outright *quality* put into these goods that, goodness gracious, I've never seen before in my life.

I'm flying NRT-LAX right now and at the airport 7-eleven I bought a ton of snacks to bring home to family. I think that 7-eleven knows people have a preference for this because this one seemed particularly stocked with a rich diversity of snacks. So there you have it, folks. Not to mention the suitcases of gifts I bought, I'm about to become a Japanese Santa Claus.

TIL that Tokyo feels more like a home to me than Osaka

Part of it is that there is some cultural differences between the residents of Osaka vs Tokyo (Osaka is slightly more rough around the edges, for Japanese standards). The other is that I went "back" to Tokyo and hung out with my friend again, so there's a bit of a "return" effect. Osaka doesn't have nearly as much stuff as Tokyo, and yet is still sort of in the same category of a city. If I were to go back to Japan, I'd spend more time in Tokyo and probably not Osaka. But Kyoto is amazing and is sweet in its own right. 

TIL que la tienda de Zara en Japan es fantástico para mí

Hoy estaba en Osaka y fui en un tour con otros turismos. Pero cuando hemos terminado, fui de shopping para ropa nueva. Y cuando entré Zara, yo estaba sorprendido porque me encantaba la ropa. Es magnifica. Ahora quiero comprar toda de la ropa de Zara de Japan. Pues, pienso que es porque a mí, la gente de Japan es muy creativa.

Remarks on learning Japanese in Japan

1) One thing that makes it easy to learn Japanese while in Japan is that everyone is so kind and friendly in their conduct that you don't feel discouraged from trying.

2) For learning languages in another country, I love using ChatGPT as a life hack. It's like having a friend who's available to whisper in your ear what to say, right in the moment, and also give you the English syllable breakdown so you can get close enough to enunciating it. Not to mention that if you improve you can have convos with ChatGPT in the language or have it help you fix your grammar or word usage. It's way faster than Google Translate or Google search. Frankly, googling "survival language X" on Google search and then scrolling through the content of an article is painful.

3) It's also easy to start a conversation with a Japanese person because in Japan, everyone has so much unique clothing you can compliment them on their shirt, just like in America. This is different from other parts of the world where people are all wearing the exact same thing, or perhaps nothing creative in particular.

4) After being in Asia for 4 months and especially Japan, I bow a lot now and hand items with two hands, and am more comfortable using chopsticks that sometimes I completely ditch the fork for a chopstick because it feels better. I wonder how many of these habits will stick around, and whether it'll be weird if they half-stick and I'm in the U.S.

5) Special thanks to my mom for basically 100% coordinating this Japan trip and encouraging me to push onward to Japan when I was already ready to end my Asia trip. Although it's never good to rank countries, I honestly think Japan tops all the countries I visited (though Vietnam and Japan cannot be compared, because Vietnam has a special place in my heart). I think Japan is such a special place and has such rich culture and artistic creativity. It's enough to incentivize me to keep learning the language and adopt it as my 4th language, even if only to be able to continue to sip from the vast artistic and design depth of Japan over the rest of my life.

When learning another language, don’t try swearing to sound cool

Beyond the usual reason that in highly respectful societies will come off as extremely rude, it's because it will sound dissonant and discordant, and for some reason make the native speakers around you feel worried.

You don't want to pick up slang and swear is because the cool usage is likely super subtle in a way you will not understand. Really great perspective I got was being on the receiving instead of giving side of this. In Asia I remember meeting someone who learned English as a secondary language and was swearing in English in a playful way to be more colloquial with me, but I found it less endearing than I imagined and more worrisome. As in worrisome on the other person's behalf. I don't know why I felt that, but it's due to something along these lines.

Self-pop quiz: Japanese that I've learned

Arigato gozaimas = thank you

Arigato = thank you (informal, would be rude in public)

Arigato gozaimasu = thank you but more formal, I noticed older people and service people will use this more often

Domo arigato gozaimasu = thank you but most full and more textbook I think (so more formal)

Domo arigato = thank you (formal) according to the Internet as an alternative to arigato gozaimas, but I never heard anyone say this other than an old man from Takayama. Or domo arigato means "thanks a lot", so maybe half informal because gozaimas is missing but made up in formality with the domo.

Sumimasen (my mnemonic: "sue me, my Zen") = excuse me or sorry. You use this a million times. You can also barely whisper this and surprisingly, a Japanese person can hear you!

To-i-re wa doko desu ka? = where is the toilet?

Ko-re wa doko desu ka? (my mnemonic: Kore like Korea) = where is this?

Kore wa nan desu ka? = what is this?

Kore onegaishimas = this please

A-re onegaishimas = that please

Mizu onegaishimas = water please

Gohan onegaisimas (my mnemonic: sounds like my friend Sohan) = rice please

Okaikei onegaishimas (my mnemonic: sounds like Hawaiian lol) = bill please

Piinitsu = peanut

arereguii (not sure I got that right) = allergy

Menyuu = menu

Ohio onegaishimas (mnemonic: sounds like Ohio the state, please lol) = good morning

konichiwa = good afternoon

kanbanwa (?,... not sure if I spelled that right. You make some weird Kung Pow Chicken noise with your mouth) = good evening

Sayonara = goodbye

wakarimasen (my mnemonic: "Bulgari, my Zen" with w) = I don't understand

tomeshite (my mnemonic: "tommy shit"), mo ii ka? = try it is okay?

cardo, mo ii desu ka? = card is okay?

hitori = one person

Hitori no teburu onegaishimas = one person table please

yoroshiku onegaishimas (my mnemonic: "Euro shiku") = I am in your debt (deeper thank you; use this if someone spent extra time to help you, I think)

¡Duh! Puedo practicar mi español en este blog

No sé por qué, puedo solamente ahora descubrí que puedo practicar mi español usando este lugar. Es bueno porque puedo escribir cada noche y mejorar mí español.

TIL from Osaka: train platform mechanical safety cables

Okay, I'm going to shoot for roughly nightly reflections using the TIL (Today I Learned) style, mainly to help build some consistent habit into my daily life. Also because journaling is good for stress.

Well, I took the train down from Kyoto and a really cool thing I learned about Japanese public transportation is that they have these bungee cord-like cables at the platform of the train station, so you have some safety of not falling off the platform. And when the train arrives, then these mechanical arms raise the soft rubber cables way above your head so you can cross and enter the train. It seems like a super cost effective way to implement the usual door gates that line up for subways, while also being super design smart because you don't need to account for the train to line up (and train lengths, future trains, etc). Honestly, Japan is an amazing paradise for designers.

Osaka is really cool. Going from Kyoto to Osaka, now there's higher population density again and it feels like popping back into Toyko. I've got a day tour tomorrow by a Spanish expat. So I get to practice my Spanish on the tour before going to Mexico in 11 days.

Takayama onsen

I tried the Japanese Onsen public bath in the inn. I went at 7am which was great timing because it meant the bath was recently cleaned. And everyone was busy eating breakfast so I had the bath to myself. I ain't wanna see no wenis. 

It's very beautiful (the interior design and the traditions) and very clean, but I didn't find it very relaxing because there's like 16 steps you have to follow. It's a bit like an OCD esque homestay with a bunch of passive aggressive signs everywhere. Also I don't find being naked in public very relaxing. 

There's a shower step before the bath step, so I did that. But when I got to the bath, since my body is sensitive I found the bath to be way too hot for me to even put my foot in. So at the most I ended up taking a "public shower" in the public bathhouse.

All-in-all an interesting experience!

Hello I am a Child

On the train to Takayama, Japan, out the window I saw some elementary school kids walking home from school. They wear these bright yellow caps 🧢 as part of their school uniform. Really great way to keep track of the kids and indicate, "Hello, I am a child."

Reflection: nonprofit vs for-profit

Note 2023-08-18: This is a clumsy freewrite and kind of just a mishmash. 

I'm not sure why, but I've gone in circles on this one for the last 2 months: Should I start a nonprofit or a for-profit? I needed to write some reflection down here so I can stop being confused.

Non-profit benefits:

Possibly a higher probability path to a breakout career

Impact is much closer to the ground (hence not deluded)

Higher probability of organizing a great Manhattan Project

Makes full use of my talent?

A job like this ensures that I am networking and making friends with the kinds of people I think I'd really enjoy being around

For-profit benefits:

Sustainable living, including the ability to have a family

Compounding effect of business acumen

Use what I learned in college

Reward for hard work? Or, ability to be taken care of re: family, health, and welfare/time off

Creating a self sustaining organization

Creating abundance

Okay, so what are the things I "need"? Strong relationships, a meaningful contribution to humanity, and money to sustain. 

The other thing as well is the opportunity to organize a "great Manhattan Project" that accomplishes something extremely useful for the world and which otherwise would not exist. I think this is something along the lines of, The best societal use of my talent is in leadership until proven otherwise, hence I still need to prove it otherwise.

What are the great Manhattan Projects which otherwise wouldn't occur? Seems like, climate regulatory bottlenecks in the U.S., modernization of California, or pandemic defenses against another really bad pathogen.

Naturally, seems like you can't have everything. And trying to optimize can make your head spin. I've been trying to optimize for years. Doesn't seem to be productive. 

Last 6 months, I've also been reading How to Decide by Annie Duke on and off. I think I should apply some of the techniques to this decision-making. 

What's the conclusion? Still, I don't know.

Plan A: Nonprofit

Plan B: Series of tiny business projects that compound on each other, a bit like an underdog rebel. And go back to grad school.

Plan Z: Back to the office job, but at least it pays well and can allow me to move to New York

Okay, so I have a need for a vibrant social life, and it seems like this is going to come from binding together people under a common cause. Otherwise the adhesion of people seems to flitter away. Interest groups are what bind people together, and it seems like if this is my biggest interest group I should cultivate it instead of let it sit to the side. One thing that confuses me about adulthood is that people don't choose their coworkers, and so you end up spending so much of your life with people that may or may not nourish your existence(?).

The nice thing about working on climate change is that people were quite willing to take your meeting, and so it's easy to form a friend connection that way.

Okay, so by writing this, it seems like the best path forward is still the nonprofit route. 

Oh yeah, I mean the key paradox I was going to before was that, when I was trying to do the for-profit route, the biggest impediment was in fact the lack of connections. Hence really the bottleneck to be solved is having more connections. So if the nonprofit route is the direction with the highest probability of a breakout career that doesn't yield money but does yield more connections, then ultimately that's the best place to be aiming.

I think that reminds me of a family friend I met in Singapore who was a successful serial entrepreneur, and he told a pretty interesting story about how it's important to serve the community first before striking your success as an entrepreneur. In his case, he spend a lot of time serving the government and business community of Singapore, and so later when he wanted to start some businesses, it was so clear that he had done so much for Singapore that Singapore was going to bend over backwards a little bit for him. That's the first time I'd heard something like that. So, it's to say that it's not like non-profit and for-profit work exist in completely different domains. Ultimately, the most important thing is to be really good at what you do.

I think the A, B, Z planning helped a bit. Ultimately, there's still a lot of research and validating of Plan A before I dive headfirst into it. And if it's looking to be quite unpromising, then back into the trenches of small, creative businesses I should go.