Birthday! Another year older, another year where I don’t write a wisdom post. Don’t worry; I’m bound to learn something eventually.

Marked it with a lovely dinner at Swift & Sons. Maybe a bigger get together is in the cards for when proper patio weather arrives.

Apparently this Wednesday was “everybody release your new subway maps” day. New York’s is a triumph and I will hear no argument to the contrary. Chicago’s I’m a little more conflicted on; I like the new emphasis on the parks and boulevards, but miss the street grid on the previous version.

Finally got a chance to sit down and tear through The Unaccountability Machine^[1] by Dan Davies. Shocking that it’s taken this long to coin a term for “accountability sinks”, the policies and structures that mark the asymmetry of every modern interaction: “a state of affairs where [the company] can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.” Pretty sure I highlighted more than half this book.

This bit certainly seemed relevant this week looking at the big dumb tariff chart:

If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are relatively junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which are later adopted as fundamental constraints; to do otherwise would mean someone having to risk being criticized for making a decision.

The whole affair has me flashing back to my days working at Marketplace during the global financial crisis. I am certainly not an economist, but I think our fearless leaders may not have a strong grasp on what a trade deficit actually is.