RRR3: Mother Nature's Reverse Card, Tales of Maine, CA Commonsense Legislation, and Juice vs. Infrastructure
☔🥵🧠🧃🌉
Curse of the commentator. Once you remark on a trend you have observed, it tends to come back to bite you. No sooner than I published my comments on how much I’ve enjoyed being in nature recently, I got a tick bite that led to Lyme Disease. Remember the end of RRR2 when I remarked on the cool and dry weather in CT? Yeah… try hot and wet:
As a side note, some people have remarked how weird it is that my weather app is set to Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. I wanted to get a feel for what different degrees of Celsius felt like 🤷🏻♂️.
As for the Lyme Disease, don’t shed too many tears for me, my friends! I detected the bite super early thanks to a clear-as-day bullseye on my left hip. I already have antibiotics, so I’m hoping this is a non-issue other than the fact that Doxycycline makes your skin sensitive to sunlight. Oh, wait! No sun in CT for the foreseeable future 🔥🔥.
In Recent Times…
I just returned from a long weekend in Maine, hence why this edition is going out to subscribers on a Tuesday morning instead of Sunday 😥. We were away for a big occasion… my brother celebrated 30 years around the sun! I celebrated 28 🎉🍰.
Despite being from Connecticut, I’ve never spent any meaningful time in Maine. What a treat it was to get familiar with another gem of New England. At least, part of it, anyways. There’s a lot to explore; nearly 30 Rhode Island’s can fit in the land area of Maine! We spent the majority of the weekend in the coastal south of the state, traveling no further north than the city of Portland. I seriously recommend making the trip up to Maine if you have the ability:
Portland is an incredibly cool place. On Saturday, the weather was particularly cooperative, so we got to enjoy the city at full blast. There were droves of people walking around the downtown area, popping into beautiful (and tasty) restaurants, coffee shops, stores, or just hanging out in the several little park areas built into the busiest districts of the city. I’ll be back to Portland soon; maybe I’ll go in the winter to get the fully authentic experience 🥶🧊.
I’m thankful I’ll be back in Maine come September. A close friend is getting married there, and I’ll get to spend a week or so around Acadia National Park.
One thing I will always love about getting lost in New England is the sense of how (relatively) old the municipalities are. I say relatively because the US as we know it really isn’t all that old. However, the architecture, monuments, as well as the old fishing boats, kind of bring you back to an earlier time in the country’s history 🤓.
I didn’t anticipate this section being a Maine propaganda piece, but here we are!
Readings of the Week
“The Homework Apocalypse” by Ethan Mollick
I’ve been writing a tiny bit about AI in the previous editions of RRR. I don’t know that I have too many unique angles that you guys would find all that interesting 🤷🏻♂️. As a result, I would much rather go to the well and read what others have to say. Especially, in this case, people who have spent a great deal of time thinking about how AI is impacting important areas of our world. Ethan Mollick is a professor at UPenn Wharton, so I think he knows a thing or two about what works, doesn’t work, and what the future holds within the confines of a classroom:
The Homework Apocalypse threatens a lot of good, useful types of assignments, many of which have been used in schools for centuries. We will need to adjust quickly to preserve we are in danger of losing, and to accommodate the changes AI will bring. That will take immediate effort from instructors and education leaders, as well as clearly articulated policies around AI use. But the moment isn’t just about preserving old types of assignments. AI provides the chance to generate new approaches to pedagogy that push students in ambitious ways.
“Make Better Use of Your Days” by Ben Cohen
This reading is super short. Why? It comes from one of my favorite places: minamalism.com. As the name suggests, the site is dedicated to helping us achieve inner peace and contentment from less. This short writing from Ben is one of my favorite recent pieces in the Minimalism Journal. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
Junto Club
Change is coming. I’m limiting this weeks Junto Club section again to just one of the questions. Here’s my thinking…
Some feedback I’ve gotten since I started publishing RRR is that the newsletter is running a bit long for some of you. I totally get it! In fact, not only do I get it, I sort of agree. I don’t think the length of the newsletter itself is an issue; I know that people have busy schedules, making it hard to scrounge every word of a 15-20 minute read (that’s what Substack tells me the first couple editions of RRR take to get through 😊). With that being said, I don’t think I will be making adjustments now, or in the future to cut back on words just for the sake of it. I am more than okay with the idea of people navigating to certain sections they want to read on a given week, and leaving the others behind. Instead, I think shortening up the amount of topics I’m covering in the newsletter will allow me to expand more on the ones I do cover.
I have felt a bit frustrated at times while trying to create the first couple editions of RRR. Thankfully, this is not because it’s been difficult to find the words to express my thoughts and feelings! On the contrary… I have found it extremely hard to leave certain sections alone and simply move on, when I feel like there are important angles that need to be discussed 😣. I have felt rushed trying to explain different things, like why certain readings were profound to me, why meditation can be so beneficial, and why the Bradley Beal trade to Phoenix is a sign of things to come :). I am weighing multiple little tweaks to the standard layout of RRR, and hope to have an announcement on that for you all soon. In the meantime, thank you for your patience while I figure this out. There is so, so much to think about in crafting this newsletter for you all 🤯😬.
Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?
I should write about my fathers worthy action, who quite literally just came up the stairs with some fresh strawberries we picked in Maine 🍓🍓🍓. What a guy!
But, today, I want to deliver a quick precursor of what is to come in a future edition. I plan on interviewing my friend Sergio Castaneda about his journey as a prolific Airbnb host in Columbus, Ohio. Yes, this is the same Sergio responsible for the “Ramblings, Readings, and Reposados” tagline we used to close out RRR2. Here’s one of his listings. 4.95 stars on 410 reviews! In NBA circles, we call that efficiency on volume!
I always joke with people when I talk about Sergio that in our Drexel University days, he was bringing in 200K as a student 🤣. Yes, we had full time jobs through the Drexel co-op program, but we certainly weren’t making that kind of money :). However, the joke stems from the fact that outside of whatever full time job responsibilities he had at the time, Sergio was always side hustling. I ought to pic-stitch together a collage of all Sergio’s profiles on the ride sharing / food delivery apps 🤔. A favorite story of mine is when we were cruising around Philly in his car on an exceptionally cold day, and I deigned to ask him to turn on the heat… “You got heat money? Go ahead and zip up your coat” 😂😂.
I want to write about Sergio, not because of his hilarious and ruthless capitalistic tendencies (he’s actually an extremely generous dude). Instead, it would be deeply interesting to profile how he got to where he is today, his approach to taking calculated and responsible risks, and how do it in a way that doesn’t require living an extreme lifestyle. His work ethic is truly a thing of beauty, and I plan on crafting an interview method to display that as well. For him, I don’t think working as hard as he does is all that much of a conscious decision. I suspect it comes very naturally.
Interviewing someone for RRR will be an interesting adventure. Let’s see how it goes!
Infrastructure Streamlining Bill Passes in CA 🎈🎉🎊
The California Environmental Quality Act, “generally requires state and local government agencies to inform decision makers and the public about the potential environmental impacts of proposed projects, and to reduce those environmental impacts to the extent feasible.” This bill was enacted in 1970, which really makes me want to side bar into a discussion of how early we as a society tend to be thinking about the right things (in this case, preserving the environment), and how long it can be until we take the right actions to address it. However, we’ll practice some impulse control today 😉.
Today’s news is a new judicial streamlining measure, aimed at expediting infrastructure projects in the state, and clearing some of the bureaucratic hurdles they can often run into. Here’s the fact sheet for your reference. Some highlights:
In recent years, the Legislature has created an expedited judicial process for certain projects that it finds are in the public’s interest to be resolved quickly. Most recently, the Legislature adopted Senate Bill 7 (Atkins, 2021), also known as the Jobs and Economic Improvement Through Environmental Leadership Act of 2021, which extended a prior, similar streamlining provision for certain large projects with specified environmental attributes.
This CEQA judicial streamlining proposal for water, transportation, clean energy, and certain semiconductor or microelectronics projects has been modeled on SB 7 and is designed to provide similarly swift resolution to CEQA challenges to critical infrastructure projects.
It continues…
California expects to make historic investments in infrastructure as a result of funding made available by the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS and Science Act, as well as separate investments reflected in this Administration’s proposed budget. These investments will lead to the development of numerous transportation, clean-energy, and water-related facilities across the state that would further California’s commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting its people from the worst extremes of climate change. These projects will be publicly financed in whole or in part and will result in substantial public benefits, including generation of full-time jobs during construction and additional jobs once the projects are constructed and operating. Given the substantial public benefits expected from these infrastructure investments, it is imperative that the environmental review and planning processes proceed as efficiently as possible, without sacrificing the public’s ability to participate fully in those processes and while preserving all appropriate environmental protections.
At first glance, this is fantastic news. I plan on doing some additional reading to try and understand the success of the earlier judicial streamlining provisions the state has enacted. This should help us extrapolate whether or not we should expect this particular move to be successful. I particularly like the idea of creating a lean process, especially at a time when historic public funding is being made available for infrastructure projects. There is definitely a way to move quickly while preserving environmental protections! Commonsense legislation deserves a shoutout when it happens 🥂.
NBA Free Agency Chaos 🧨🔥🚒
My goodness. So much has happened since the beginning of NBA free agency. I know that as fans, we are supposed to love the games more than the drama surrounding the sport, but I do think that team building strategies applied in the NBA are fascinating, given the constraints teams have to work around. In addition, it’s unfolding seemingly 365 days a year, which makes it a really fun league to follow 🤷🏻♂️. I’m going to revisit this topic a bunch of times over the summer, so I want to introduce a framework that I believe can be helpful for considering whether a certain move is good or bad for an NBA team… I’ll try and keep it very simple:
The Concept of Player Value vs. Player Ability
In the NBA you have a salary cap, meaning you can only carry so much payroll each season. Let’s say we could objectively rate player ability on a scale of 1-10:
Would you rather have a level 8 player taking up 25% of your salary cap, or a level 7 player taking 8% of your salary cap? Situations matter, but it’s helpful to at least think about the league this way. The more sound argument is that the value is better on the level 7 player making less money.
Team Needs
To win in the NBA you need a combination of juice and infrastructure. These are terms I’m prepared to coin here today. Juice can be loosely defined as unique and above average skill level on offense. Infrastructure can be categorized as less glamorous but necessary capabilities to win basketball games. Think of rebounding, perimeter defense, rim protection on defense, and catch and shoot capability on offense.
Here’s what juice looks like in some of its purest form:
Here’s a look at an example of infrastructure:
Ideally, some of your best players can serve both purposes! Those would be your LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Kawhi Leonard’s of the world.
With all that out of the way, let’s looks at a couple deals I like, and a couple I cannot understand:
Draymond Green - 4 years, $100M to stay in Golden State
This one is less about the fit, and more about basketball purity. The trio of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green, should not be broken up if they can help it! This is such a feel good contract. These guys were each drafted by the team, and have had wild amounts of success with one another (to the tune of 4 championships), which is extremely rare in this league. Beyond that, their skillsets are so complimentary to one another, it creates truly beautiful basketball. Props to the Warriors and Draymond for getting this done.
Donte DiVincenzo - 4 years, $50M to the New York Knicks
This is a very shrewd bit of business for the Knicks. DiVincenzo shoots the ball extremely well from three and is a prolific rebounder for his size (infrastructure). He seems to slot in really nicely with the rest of the roster, and doesn’t require big minutes or having the ball in his hands too much. $12.5M a year is a very good number for him!
Khris Middleton and Brook Lopez - $58M per season to stay with the Milwaukee Bucks
I don’t love this for Milwaukee. Brook Lopez is 35, Middleton is 32, and each are not far removed from serious injuries. $58M is a huge salary cap hit for two players that frankly were not a ton of help as the Bucks were getting beaten out of the playoffs this past season by the Miami Heat. I still think the greatness of Giannis and Jrue Holiday can potentially propel the team to a deep playoff run, but this is starting to feel like a situation that will be teetering if they have another disappointing season.
Dillon Brooks - 4 years, $80M to the Houston Rockets
🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️. Not sure what the Rockets were thinking on this one. I think if I gave truth serum to their general manager Rafael Stone, he would tell me that they had a lot of cap space to use, and it’s better to spend it than have it burn a hole in your pocket. However, I really don’t think that line of logic is sound in this particular case. I don’t envision there was any sort of market near this price point for Dillon Brooks after his tumultuous tenure with the Memphis Grizzlies. Even if they wanted to spend the cap space they had, assuming they couldn’t find another player to sign, why give him 4 years? Pay him a little more over a shorter term to preserve long term flexibility with your salary. I had been telling some Philadelphia 76er fans that the team should look to sign Brooks to a deal around $8-10M a year! Boy did I get that one wrong.
It’s Not Always About Statistics…
When I began writing RRR, I used my coming soon post to explain to potential readers what they could expect. More importantly, I used it as a true expression of why I desired to write:
There are, however, personal benefits I know I will derive from a continued writing practice. For one, I’ll improve my long form thought expression capabilities; capabilities that haven’t been developed in a meaningful way since my college days. Additionally I might hope to see my life and the events surrounding me a bit differently, if I train myself to habitually think, “what would I say about this if I were to write about it?” To the contrary, there are less selfish reasons for printing my perspective that I would be lucky to realize. If even one person is moved in a positive way by my writing, then this endeavor would have already proved fruitful in my eyes.
In a few short weeks, I nearly began to lose sight of this purpose. Let me be honest, I was absolutely blown away by the support I received from family and friends after I published RRR1. It was easy to check the viewership statistics in the Substack writer dashboard, so I would peak every once in a while to see the rate at which people were finding my work through Substack (or through the light promotion I did on Instagram). As I sat down to write this week, I wanted to take a moment to reaffirm why I am doing this.
Thus far, I have absolutely become more present in each moment of my life, looking to extract lessons and insights from nearly all tidbits of my existence. I have heard from people close to me that some pieces of the newsletter is resonating with them. For this, I truly could not be more thankful. That is all I wanted to accomplish with RRR, and I already have!
It’s okay to want more readership, and increased engagement. With that being said, when you have a good idea, it’s so important not to betray the core tenets of that idea. Statistics be damned, here’s to many more editions of RRR 🍻.
That sucks about lyme... I attract bugs so much, I basically only go walk in the forest in the fall-winter-early spring :(
Nature would be so much better without these tiny monsters