May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg.
We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits.
The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees. It's very idyllic riding: lots of protected and separated lanes. There are some interesting regional differences in the riding. Swiss drivers were noticeably more aggressive and gave a lot less space to bikes, but the Swiss infrastructure was really nice when it was off-road. Also it was interesting to see that the vast majority of other cyclists on most of the route were on ebikes. This only changed when we were close to hip cities and we'd notice more young people on high-end road bikes.
Taking the ride in 40-60 mile days left a lot of room for checking out the towns, food, and views. It was very easy being vegan in Germany, and significantly harder in Austria and Switzerland. Some highlights:
- KERVAN Imbiss in Konstanz: cheap, delicious vegan kebabs
- Insel Mainau: beautiful botanical garden on an island, recommended to follow up with Biergarten St. Katharina, a beer garden in the woods
- The Pile Dwelling Museum in Uhldingen-Mühlhofen-Unteruhldingen: very aesthetic museum plus recreations of pile dwellings
- In Zurich: the Swiss National Museum was gigantic and featured the best-integrated high-tech exhibits I've seen
- On the final evening we took a cable car up to Panorama Restaurant Falsenegg and it delivered on the name
Reading
I read The Technological Republic the book by Alex Karp and one of his employees. It was terrible as expected: part sales-pitch, part standard-issue MAGA cultural critique, part implied defense of just war. The last part was the most interesting to me, because Karp spends so much time grandstanding about his intellectual background and telling protestors to quiet down and have a real discussion, and this book confirms that he can't actually have that conversation. He has nothing to say about the moral complexity or justification of war.
It's surprising that the only critical reviews I could find of the book are from other right-leaning sources. Providence, an American Christian Realist magazine, found it too weak. The Independent Institute didn't like it based on their Libertarian principles. I guess it's just so far from any left-wing thought that nobody bothers to read it.
Democratic governance rests on a bargain so old we’ve forgotten it’s a bargain at all. The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage. The whole system functions because power is distributed, and it’s distributed because the people at the top need something from the people at the bottom.
I'm still trying to avoid writing about AI, but this piece by Owen McGrann was worth the time. It takes a lot of points that I've long agreed with and stitches them together into a coherent but miserable whole.
On the bright side, I'm just finishing reading Intermezzo and it's wonderful. A totally rejuvenating and inspiring novel.
Listening
Cheekface is a ~9 year old band in the tradition of Cake, They Might Be Giants, etc. They've got some great hits - part sardonic and ironic, part euphoric and ultra-light pop choruses.
Watching
Adam Neely's talking about AI and music again, and like always, it's very worth watching. The generational element is especially interesting here: just like the commencement speakers getting booed, there's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.