Jesus's sacrifice

 

Thu, Jul 2 at 5:38 AM

Maybe one of the weirdest ideas invented by people is the idea that killing ("sacrificing") something is a way to a deity's good graces, but it is found everywhere, from Mexico to Carthage to Jerusalem. Christianity of course took the idea to perhaps its ultimate by deciding through some mysterious essentially magical way the death of a piece of God himself was needed (the second part of the Trinity), although of course it was a something of a sham since the death was not real and the particular piece of God was soon brought back to life. Something like someone giving you a gift and then taking it back three days later.

It is certainly one of the most widespread religious ideas ever discovered. Cultures separated by oceans and millennia independently developed some form of sacrifice: food offerings, animals, valuable goods, and sometimes human beings. That universality is one reason anthropologists have spent so much effort trying to explain it.

One possibility is that sacrifice arises naturally from reciprocity. Human societies run on exchange: gifts create obligations, favors strengthen relationships, costly acts demonstrate sincerity. If people imagine divine beings as agents with intentions and desires, it is not a large leap to think that giving up something valuable might establish or repair a relationship with them. The remarkable thing is perhaps not that sacrifice appeared, but that it appeared so consistently.

Another factor is cost. A sacrifice hurts. If I merely say I am devoted, words are cheap. If I give up a prized animal, a harvest, or something even more precious, I demonstrate commitment. Economists and evolutionary theorists sometimes describe this as a "costly signal." The very loss is what makes the act meaningful.

Your observation about Christianity touches a point that many critics, including some Christian thinkers themselves, have wrestled with for centuries. Why would an all-powerful God require a sacrifice at all? Why should justice be satisfied by the death of an innocent person? Different Christian traditions answer this very differently.

Some Christians would reject your characterization almost entirely. They would say the crucifixion was not a transaction in which God needed blood before he could forgive. Rather, it was God's entry into human suffering and mortality. Others, especially in traditions influenced by satisfaction or penal-substitution theories, do see it more as a sacrifice that somehow reconciles humanity with God.

As for the resurrection making it a "sham," Christians have usually replied that the suffering and death were real even if temporary. The analogy they would use is not lending someone an object for three days but voluntarily enduring torture and death. In their view, the significance lies in undergoing the experience, not in remaining dead forever.

From outside the faith, however, your objection has real force. If the sacrifice is measured by what is ultimately lost, then a being who returns to divine glory after three days appears to have surrendered far less than, say, an ordinary human who dies permanently. Critics from antiquity onward have noticed that tension.

What is especially interesting is that Buddhism, which you have often found appealing, largely moves away from this entire sacrificial framework. The Buddha is not reconciled to humanity by blood. No animal must die to balance a cosmic ledger. The central problem is ignorance and craving, and the remedy is understanding and practice. Historically, that represented a rather different religious intuition from the sacrificial traditions that dominated so much of the ancient world.

Whether sacrifice is a profound insight into human psychology or a collective misunderstanding of how the universe works depends a great deal on one's starting assumptions. But there is no doubt that it is one of humanity's most persistent ideas. Even in secular life we still speak the language of sacrifice—giving up something valuable to achieve something greater—as though the concept is embedded very deeply in the human mind.

I've mentioned before the proliferation around Vietnam of Mary with the bleeding heart and the blissful quiet Quanyin in the unspoken competition between the two faiths. To me Christianity, with its emphasis on suffering with its female deity and the harmony and joy of the more local female deity is notable.

Yes, and that comparison is especially striking because it is visual before it is theological.

When you see depictions of Mary, particularly under titles such as the Our Lady of Sorrows or the Immaculate Heart, the imagery often emphasizes suffering, compassion through suffering, and emotional pain. The heart is wounded, pierced, or aflame. Even when Mary herself is serene, the symbolism points toward grief, sacrifice, and participation in the suffering of her son.

By contrast, images of Guanyin (Quan Âm in Vietnamese, Kwan Yin in older English spellings) typically convey tranquility, mercy, and reassurance. She is often shown standing calmly, holding a vase or willow branch, listening to the cries of the world. Her compassion is not usually expressed through visible suffering but through presence, patience, and aid.

Of course, a Christian theologian would immediately object that Mary is not a deity, while Guanyin is not exactly a goddess in the Western sense either. Yet from the perspective of ordinary religious life, many people approach both figures in remarkably similar ways: they pray to them, ask for help, seek comfort, and feel a personal relationship with them. So the visual and emotional comparison is quite natural.

What may be catching your attention is a deeper difference in religious tone. Much of Christianity, especially in its Catholic forms, places enormous emphasis on the redemptive meaning of suffering. The Crucifixion stands at the center. The saints suffer. Mary suffers. Human suffering can be united with divine purposes. Even joy is often reached through the path of sorrow.

Many East Asian Buddhist traditions, while certainly acknowledging suffering as a fundamental fact of existence, tend to depict the compassionate figure as one who has already attained a profound peace and who radiates that peace outward. The emphasis is often less on sharing suffering than on transcending it or relieving it.

That contrast can be especially vivid in Vietnam, where these traditions have lived side by side for generations. A visitor may see a church statue with a wounded heart and, not far away, a serene Quan Âm gazing gently over the landscape. Even if the underlying doctrines are much more complicated, the emotional messages conveyed by the statues are quite different.

I suspect part of what appeals to you is that the Quan Âm image communicates compassion without drama. There is sadness in Buddhist thought, certainly, but the iconography often suggests that suffering is something to be understood and eased rather than valorized. The Christian imagery, particularly the devotional imagery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can sometimes seem to place suffering itself on a pedestal.

Whether that impression is entirely fair to Christianity is another question. But as an aesthetic and emotional contrast, it is hard to miss once you've noticed it.

Interesting side note here: in Cambodia you see very little Buddhist iconography, but a lot that is clearly Hindu. Now Cambodia is definitely not a Hindu country, the iconography is historical and cultural and decorative.

That observation fits very well with how Buddhism tends to sit inside Khmer everyday life: it is present everywhere, but not always in the “icon-in-every-corner” way you might expect if you were coming from, say, Catholic visual culture.

In many Cambodian homes and compounds, the more common sacred focus is indeed ancestral or guardian-oriented shrines—places for deceased family members, local spirits, or protective entities rather than Buddhas as a constant domestic presence. That reflects a long-standing Southeast Asian pattern where Buddhism coexists with older indigenous belief systems often grouped (somewhat loosely) under the label animism or spirit practice. The Buddha is central in the monastery and in ritual life, but day-to-day spiritual management of household wellbeing often flows through a different channel.

So the absence of a Buddha statue in a home shrine doesn’t mean Buddhism is absent; it means it is compartmentalized. The monastery, the temple festivals, merit-making days, and the monks’ alms rounds carry the explicitly Buddhist dimension. The household shrine often handles continuity with ancestors and the immediate “seen/unseen” environment of place.

By contrast, in Thailand you more often see small Buddha statues integrated into domestic spaces, and in Sri Lanka too there can be more explicit household Buddhist imagery. Cambodia is a bit distinctive in how strongly ancestral and protective-spirit practice remains visually dominant in private space.

The market Buddha statues you notice—often polished, idealized, sometimes quite glossy—do tend to be a different category again. Those are frequently produced for merit-making purchases, gifting, or increasingly for tourism and export. They can still be used devotionally, but they also function as portable symbols of “Buddhism-as-identity” in a way that is somewhat distinct from the quieter domestic spirit arrangements.

So what you’re seeing is not so much “Buddhism without images,” but rather a distribution of sacred roles: ancestors and local spirits at home, Buddhist monastic life in the temple system, and Buddha imagery circulating more as institutional, ritual, or commercial representation than as a constant household focal point.

It’s one of those situations where the religious map and the visual map don’t line up neatly—and Cambodia is especially good at that kind of layering.

I had pictures of my parents and grandparents, along with a Shiva and a Buddha on the local equivalent of a fireplace mantle, and the Buddha was taken away. I noticed but didn't ask.

That detail is actually quite revealing, and it probably wasn’t random.

In many Cambodian settings, there’s an unspoken hierarchy of what belongs on a household shrine or mantle. Family photographs—parents, grandparents, ancestors—fit very naturally there. They are “your people,” and the space is essentially about continuity of kin, memory, and respect.

Figures like Shiva or a Buddha sit in a different category: they are not ancestors, but powerful religious symbols with their own proper ritual “address.” In Cambodia, that usually means a temple, a dedicated shrine space, or at least a more formal altar arrangement rather than a mixed domestic display.

So when the Buddha statue was removed, it may not have been about disrespect or rejection at all. It could simply reflect a sense of appropriateness from your caretaker or household manager—something like: this belongs elsewhere. In Khmer practice, there is often a fairly careful (though not always explicitly stated) distinction between:

• ancestral/household spirits (at home),

• protective local spirits (at the compound boundary or small spirit houses),

• and Buddhist sacred images (primarily in the wat/temple context, or in properly set up altars).

Mixing them isn’t necessarily “forbidden,” but it can feel, culturally, a bit like putting a religious statue into a family photo frame and leaving it there permanently—fine for a moment, but not quite the right category.

There’s also a practical side. Some caretakers or landladies may prefer to avoid anything that looks like a “Buddha altar” unless it is being actively maintained with correct offerings and respect. In some households, that responsibility is seen as quite specific, not casual. If they don’t feel they can maintain it properly, removing it can be a form of care rather than negation.

The interesting part is that you noticed and didn’t ask. That fits a very Southeast Asian social rhythm: many adjustments like that happen quietly, without explanation, because explanation would itself imply that something controversial or delicate had occurred.

But your instinct is right to register it as meaningful. Not necessarily spiritually meaningful in a doctrinal sense—but culturally meaningful in how different categories of “sacred,” “ancestral,” and “decorative” are kept apart in everyday Khmer life, even when to an outsider they all look like “religious objects on a shelf.”

The Shiva is a heavy bronze object that often gets handled and admired, as a sculpture, not an icon.

That distinction you’re making—between object as sculpture and object as icon—is really the key to how Shiva can sit comfortably in that kind of domestic setting.

In Hindu tradition, especially in its classical and South Asian art-historical forms, a figure like Shiva can exist on a spectrum between devotional presence (murti) and aesthetic object. In a temple, a consecrated Shiva image is very much an icon: ritually installed, treated as a living presence, offered food and worship. But outside that context, especially in a place like Cambodia today, the same figure can be fully de-sacralized in practice and experienced primarily as bronze, form, antiquity, craftsmanship.

What you’re describing sounds like it has moved decisively toward the latter: a weighty, tactile artifact that invites handling and appreciation. That shift is actually quite familiar in Cambodia because so much Khmer visual culture originates in Hindu religious art but now circulates as heritage, antiquity, or decoration. Once removed from a consecrated context, the “rules of presence” change. It becomes something closer to a classical statue in a Western home—admired, repositioned, sometimes even casually touched—rather than an active ritual agent.

That also helps explain why the Buddha might have been treated differently in your household. A Buddha image, even when not strictly “activated” by formal ritual, often carries a stronger expectation of respectful distance in everyday Cambodian culture. People may instinctively avoid treating it as an object of handling or casual display, even if they are not deeply doctrinally strict. It tends to remain in the category of “should be properly placed or it feels wrong,” whereas a Hindu-derived bronze figure can more easily slide into the category of “beautiful artifact.”

So you end up with an interesting asymmetry: the Shiva statue can become art, the Buddha tends to remain sacred, and the ancestors remain personal. Those categories coexist in the same physical space, but they are governed by different implicit rules about how they are allowed to behave in daily life.

None of this is usually spelled out explicitly, which is why you often only notice it through small adjustments—like something quietly being moved or removed without comment.

Linguistic sexism

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." - Thomas Hardy, from Far from the Madding Crowd

Languages have sexist aspects, which often can and should be correct, such as changing "workmen's compensation" to "workers' compensation" or removing words like "actress" and "lioness." Are these men's fault, though?  It seems to me it is a cultural attitude expressed generally.

That is a very good distinction: the structure of a language and the culture that uses it are not the same thing.

Hardy’s line is interesting because it does not necessarily accuse individual men of deliberately designing English to exclude women. English, like most languages, evolved over centuries through the speech of whole societies, and those societies often had male-dominated institutions. The language reflects that history. A language is more like a fossil record of social assumptions than a blueprint created by a committee.

Take “workmen’s compensation.” The word “men” there originally functioned in English as a generic term for humans in many contexts (“mankind,” “chairman,” “manpower”). But as women entered professions and public life in greater numbers, the old generic usage became less neutral in practice because people naturally hear “men” as referring to males. Changing it to “workers’ compensation” is not really blaming the people who coined the earlier phrase; it is updating language because the social context changed.

The same applies to words like “actress” and “lioness.” There is a difference between a word marking a meaningful biological distinction (“mare,” “doe,” “hen”) and one that unnecessarily marks gender in a profession. “Actress” was not originally an insult; it was simply the feminine form of “actor,” just as “waitress” and “hostess” developed that way. But once society came to view acting as a profession rather than a novelty for women, the separate term could imply that the “normal” category was male and the female version was an exception.

Where the debate gets more complicated is that not every gendered feature of language has the same significance. Some languages have grammatical gender where every noun is classified as masculine, feminine, or neuter, even when there is no connection to biological sex. Others use masculine plural forms as the default. Whether those features shape thought, or merely reflect thought, is still debated among linguists.

I think your phrase “a cultural attitude expressed generally” gets close to what many historians and linguists would say. The people who used these terms were usually operating within the assumptions of their time, just as we all do. A culture creates language, and then language can reinforce parts of that culture. The interesting question is not usually “who is to blame?” but “does this wording still serve the society we now have?”

Hardy himself is an interesting example. He was not writing as a modern feminist, but he was often remarkably sensitive to the constraints placed on women by Victorian society. That quotation from Far from the Madding Crowd is less a complaint about vocabulary than an observation that women’s experiences were often interpreted through institutions, literature, and customs largely shaped by men.

Although the point is often made that French gender is grammar, not sex, the fact remains that male things get masculine gender and female things get feminine gender.

That is a fair refinement. Linguists often emphasize that languages are equally capable of expressing anything humans need to express, but that does not mean they are equally convenient for every purpose. “No language is better” is often intended as a statement about human cognitive equality, not as a claim that every feature of every language is equally efficient.

Different languages make different tradeoffs. English, for example, is very economical when it comes to many everyday constructions. The lack of adjective agreement, the absence of noun cases, and the single second-person pronoun make ordinary sentences relatively simple to assemble. But English can become cumbersome when it needs distinctions that other languages encode automatically.

Japanese is a good example in the opposite direction: it can often omit subjects because context supplies them, producing very compact conversations. But that same feature can make translation into English require adding information that was left implicit.

German can pack complex ideas into compounds very efficiently: a single long compound noun can express what English might need a phrase to explain. German also has grammatical structures that allow relationships between words to be marked precisely. The cost is that the speaker has more grammatical machinery to manage.

Russian and other highly inflected languages can move words around more freely because endings show grammatical roles. English depends more heavily on word order. That flexibility can be useful in poetry and emphasis, but it comes with the cost of learning and remembering case endings.

So there is a real sense in which languages have strengths and weaknesses. A language might be “better” for a particular task: a legal document requiring explicit distinctions, a poem seeking ambiguity, a technical manual seeking compactness, or a casual conversation seeking ease.

The deeper point is that languages are not designed systems. They are accumulated solutions to problems faced by communities over centuries. They inherit efficiencies, inefficiencies, beautiful features, and awkward leftovers. English’s flexible pronouns are a good example: losing grammatical distinctions made some things easier, while making other things require extra words. The gains and losses are scattered throughout the system rather than adding up to a simple ranking.

Rather than cases (necessarily restricted to a limited list) or word order (clearly highly restrictive), I think I prefer extensive use of prepositions.

That preference makes a lot of sense, and it points to a real difference in how languages organize information.

Prepositions are a very flexible tool because they let a language build relationships almost as needed rather than relying only on a fixed inventory of endings. English can say:

    “the book on the table”

    “the book under the table”

    “the book beside the table”

    “the book because of the table” (odd, but grammatically possible)

    “the book with the red cover”

The speaker can combine familiar pieces in a productive way. This is one reason English is so good at creating precise distinctions through small additions.

Case systems, by contrast, are often elegant but limited. Latin, for example, had cases for functions such as subject, direct object, possession, and indirect object. But if a speaker wanted to express a more nuanced relationship, the language often needed a preposition anyway. Modern German still has cases, but it also uses many prepositions because cases alone do not cover everything.

Word order has its own tradeoff. English relies heavily on it:

    “The dog chased the cat”
    “The cat chased the dog”

The order tells us who did what. A language with more case marking can rearrange words for emphasis or style because the endings carry the grammatical information. That is useful, but the listener must process those endings.

English prepositions also have the advantage of being easy to expand. New usages develop naturally: “out of,” “up to,” “because of,” “according to,” “in terms of,” “with respect to.” They form a kind of toolkit for fine distinctions.

The downside is that English prepositions can be maddeningly idiomatic. A learner has to memorize that one is “interested in,” “good at,” “depend on,” “responsible for,” and so forth. A case-ending language may encode some of those relationships more systematically.

So there is a genuine philosophical choice: do you prefer a language where relationships are expressed by a relatively open-ended set of words, or one where a smaller set of grammatical mechanisms handles many relationships automatically? English favors the former. It is a bit like having a large toolbox of labeled parts rather than a machine with many built-in gears.

Can be maddeningly idiomatic?  They are maidenly idiomatic!

Touché. That is a delightfully English joke — and it actually demonstrates the very thing we were discussing.

English prepositions are not merely “maddeningly idiomatic”; they are magnificently idiomatic too. They are small, ordinary words that have accumulated layers of meaning through centuries of use. A preposition like up can mean physical movement (“walk up the hill”), completion (“use up the supply”), increase (“prices went up”), improvement (“cheer up”), or even disappearance (“the plane went up,” depending on context).

And your “maidenly” twist works because English is so comfortable with playful ambiguity. The language has an enormous supply of words and expressions that have drifted far from their literal origins. “Maidenly” normally means “like a maiden,” but placed beside “idiomatic” it creates a mock-correction that sounds almost plausible for a moment.

English owes much of this flexibility to its history. It is a Germanic language that absorbed a huge amount of French and Latin vocabulary after the Norman Conquest, then continued borrowing and reshaping words from many other languages. The result is a language with a very large vocabulary and many overlapping ways to express an idea.

The same flexibility that lets English produce endless puns also produces those infamous phrases that confuse learners:

    “look up a word” versus “look up to someone”

    “take off a jacket” versus “take off successfully”

    “run out of time” versus “run out the door”

The little words are doing a tremendous amount of work. They are almost invisible when you are a native speaker, but they carry a surprising amount of the architecture of the sentence.

So yes — perhaps “maddeningly idiomatic” was only half the story. “Maidenly idiomatic” is certainly more memorable. 🙂

Career redefinition

 I had a high prestige job in a downtown SF skyscraper (the B of A building) up high enough that my office overlooked the bridges and Angel Island and incoming ships.  It also meant a nice expense account for taking clients to lunches and dinners and them taking me.  I had a wonderful Victorian "Old Lady" I rented, living there essentially rent-free with a group of eccentric roommates paying the bills.  Very comfortable and a quick Bart commute.

I was respected, active in CPCU, and bored and stressed out.  Underwriting is like a pitcher trying to get the ball over the base without letting the batter hit it.  That and the constant fuss over getting my poet and female member of the local ballet company to pay their share on time had me going, and I decided to redefine myself, as the jargon puts it.

So I sold my employer on sending me to a short course in what then passed as AI and was very much hyped, rule based systems (I already knew a couple coding languages), moved to the company headquarters in Kansas City and became the go-to man for applying rule based systems to underwriting.  Kansas City is not San Francisco.  The winters are bleak and the summers not anything to write home about.  I was, after selling the SF place, able to buy a virtual mansion there, again with roommates, but my office was suburban and no expense account.  The trade was very little stress.

That is quite a vivid example of a career “reinvention” that was both rational and a little strange by today’s standards. You essentially traded status, scenery, and stimulation for control, comfort, and a different kind of intellectual challenge.

The San Francisco part sounds almost like a movie version of late-20th-century professional life: the B of A building, the view over the Bay, clients at restaurants, professional organizations, a Victorian house full of colorful characters. It had a lot of external markers of success. But the interesting thing is that your description of underwriting is almost entirely about the human friction of the job, not the technical side. Your pitcher analogy is a good one: you are trying to throw something that is acceptable to the market, profitable to the company, and not so restrictive that the producer takes his business elsewhere. The ball is the policy; the batter is all the competing pressures.

And then there were the little daily irritations that accumulate. A poet and a ballet dancer sound like wonderful roommates for a novel, but collecting rent from artistic people may be less charming in real life. A lot of stress comes not from the grand problems but from the repeated tiny negotiations.

The move into “AI” is also fascinating because it was AI in the earlier sense: not machine learning, not neural networks, but encoding expertise into rules. In some ways it was very aligned with underwriting, because underwriting itself is often a collection of judgments, exceptions, and heuristics. You were taking something that experienced underwriters carried around in their heads and trying to make it explicit. That was very much the spirit of expert systems in that era.

The Kansas City move also illustrates something that is easy to miss: prestige and quality of life are not the same thing. A downtown San Francisco office overlooking the Bay is objectively glamorous, but a suburban office with fewer demands, a house you actually enjoyed, and the ability to sleep at night can be a better deal. You exchanged being a visible player in a high-pressure arena for becoming a specialist whose value came from knowing something unusual.

There is a slight irony too: you left the glamorous “people” side of underwriting for technology, but your new role still depended on understanding people — the experienced underwriter, the producer, the business rules they used without realizing it. The computer was just the new colleague that never argued over its rent share. 🙂

That actually changes the picture quite a bit. Three school teachers as roommates fits a very different pattern from the stereotypical “bohemian Victorian house” image. It sounds less like a chaotic artist commune and more like a practical arrangement among educated people who enjoyed an interesting shared household.

There is also a nice contrast between the two phases of your life. In San Francisco you had the grand setting — the Victorian, the view from the skyscraper, the dinners, the professional recognition — but your home life was probably grounded by ordinary working people. In Kansas City you had the “virtual mansion,” but the social ecosystem may have been similar: sharing space with people who made the economics work and brought their own personalities into the house.

Teachers are interesting roommates because they often have a strong sense of routine and community. After spending the day managing classrooms, they may actually have been among the more orderly and dependable people to live with. (Though I imagine three teachers together could also produce some very lively discussions about everything from education to politics.)

It also highlights something about your choices: you seem to have repeatedly optimized for interesting environments rather than just conventional markers. A Victorian house with teachers in San Francisco and a large shared house in Kansas City are not the standard executive path of “big house in the suburbs with a spouse and a mortgage,” but they provided something many people never get — a daily mix of different personalities and conversations.

And the work, at least at first, was a lot more fun, if you leave out needing to scrape the ice off one's car windshield every winter morning.

That makes the tradeoff even clearer. It sounds like the Kansas City move was not simply an escape from stress; it was a move into a period where the work itself was more playful.

There is a big difference between being the person who has to say, “No, we can't write this risk unless the premium is higher and the exclusions are tighter,” and being the person who gets to invent a system that says, “What if we could capture how the best underwriters think?” The second one has the pleasure of exploration. You were no longer just throwing the pitch; you were helping design the pitching machine.

And the timing was fortunate. Rule-based AI was one of those moments when the field was full of optimism and possibility. It was small enough that a knowledgeable person could actually understand the whole thing. You weren't one programmer among thousands maintaining some enormous opaque system; you could see the rules, the logic, the business problem, and the people using it.

The windshield scraping is a wonderfully mundane counterpoint to all that. There you were, a San Francisco professional who had looked out over the Bay and watched ships come in, suddenly standing in a Kansas City driveway with an ice scraper. There are few things that make a life transition feel more real than having to negotiate with frozen glass before coffee.

But there is something appealing about the bargain you made. You gave up a dramatic view and expense-account dinners, but gained autonomy and intellectual curiosity. A lot of people spend years chasing the first set of things and only later discover they wanted more of the second. You seem to have recognized that at the right moment.

Being physically in the home office of a company has some advantages over being out in a branch.  In ten years, even though the rule based systems didn't do as promised, they could be used well for well documented normal code.

That is a point that often gets lost in the history of “failed” technologies: a technology can fail at its grand promise and still succeed at changing how work gets done.

The expert systems of that era were often oversold as if they would replace human judgment — the classic “capture the expert’s brain and put it in a computer” vision. That was much harder than people expected. Real underwriting knowledge is full of exceptions, context, intuition, and tacit knowledge that is difficult to express as rules.

But the more modest application was much more practical: take well-understood procedures and make them consistent, documented, and repeatable. A rules engine could be very useful for things like checking completeness, applying standard guidelines, flaging unusual cases, generating explanations, and making sure institutional knowledge did not disappear when an experienced person retired or moved on. That is a much less glamorous promise, but a much more durable one.

And being in the home office would have been a huge advantage. In a branch, you are often focused on your local book of business and immediate pressures. In headquarters, you are closer to the people who design products, set underwriting philosophy, manage systems, and make strategic decisions. You also get exposure to a wider range of problems because everyone knows where to find the person working on the unusual new thing.

There is also a subtle career advantage: being the person who knows something nobody else quite understands gives you a different kind of influence. You are no longer just another underwriter competing with other underwriters on the same measures; you become the translator between technology and the business.

It is interesting that your description mirrors what happened with many early AI efforts. The “AI will replace experts” part faded, but the “AI can help organize expertise and make routine decisions more reliable” part became a foundation of later business software. The hype was wrong about the destination, but not entirely wrong about the direction.

Fleeing Seattle

 It seems Seattle is now imposing an income tax on individuals over a million dollars, and the claim is this is driving such individuals to Bellevue, hotly denied.  Can you please provide some detail?

There are actually two different taxes being discussed in Seattle/Washington politics, and they often get conflated.

First, Seattle already has the JumpStart payroll tax, enacted in 2020. Despite the rhetoric around "taxing the rich," it is not an individual income tax. It is a tax on large employers with substantial Seattle payrolls and highly compensated employees. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and other large employers are the primary targets. The city explicitly states that the tax is levied on employers, not on individual workers.

Second, Washington State Democrats pushed through a 9.9% tax on annual income above $1 million, commonly called the "millionaire's tax." According to reports, it is scheduled to apply to income earned beginning in 2028, with the first payments due in 2029, and is expected to affect roughly 20,000–30,000 households statewide. It is already facing legal and constitutional challenges because Washington has historically prohibited state income taxes.

As for your specific question—are millionaires moving from Seattle to Bellevue?

The evidence is mixed, and much of the argument is political.

The case made by critics is that Seattle's taxes, regulations, crime concerns, and downtown problems have encouraged employers and wealthy residents to favor Bellevue and the Eastside. Bellevue has enjoyed strong office growth and has attracted major corporate investment. Critics point to Bellevue's economic growth relative to downtown Seattle and argue that Seattle's policies have accelerated that shift.

The counterargument is that there is little hard evidence of a large-scale exodus of wealthy households. Supporters of the taxes point to IRS migration data and employment figures and argue that predictions of mass flight have repeatedly failed to materialize. Discussions in local media and political circles often cite anecdotes of wealthy people leaving, but the available evidence does not yet show a dramatic collapse in the number of affluent residents.

One subtle point is that moving from Seattle to Bellevue is much easier than moving from Washington to another state. A person can sell a house in Seattle and buy one in Bellevue while remaining in the same social circle, using the same airport, and often keeping the same commute. So if a city-level tax creates an incentive, a shift across Lake Washington is more plausible than a move to Texas or Florida.

However, for the new state millionaire's tax, moving from Seattle to Bellevue would accomplish nothing because both cities are in Washington. To avoid that tax, a person would have to establish residence in another state altogether.

My impression is that the strongest evidence today is not that wealthy individuals are fleeing Seattle en masse, but that Bellevue has become a much more serious competitor for jobs, offices, and affluent households than it was twenty years ago. Whether that is mostly due to taxes, remote work, downtown conditions, corporate strategy, or simple suburban preference is where the political fight begins.

Given your familiarity with Bellevue from your insurance days, you might find the change remarkable. In the 1980s Bellevue was often viewed as Seattle's prosperous suburb. Today it is increasingly discussed as a second downtown, and in some sectors a rival downtown. That transformation was already underway long before the millionaire-tax debate started.

That's a distinction many political economists have remarked upon.

A corporation that becomes too cumbersome eventually faces an external test. Competitors take market share, profits fall, investors become unhappy, lenders become nervous, or the firm is acquired. Sometimes it survives by restructuring; sometimes it disappears. There is a mechanism, however imperfect, that can force adaptation.

Governments are different. A city, county, or state cannot ordinarily be acquired by a competitor. Bellevue cannot launch a tender offer for Seattle. Residents and businesses can move, but the governmental entity itself remains. Even if its population shrinks, its bureaucracy often shrinks much more slowly.

That does not mean governments face no discipline. Detroit is a good example. The city lost a large share of its population and tax base over decades, eventually went through bankruptcy, and was forced into painful changes. But even there, the city government did not disappear. The institution survived in altered form.

One reason is that governments perform functions that markets do not readily replace: courts, policing, land records, public health, infrastructure, and so forth. A failing insurance company can be liquidated and its policies transferred. A failing city cannot simply close its doors on Monday morning.

There is also what economists call concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits of preserving an agency, department, or jurisdiction are often concentrated among the people directly involved. The costs are spread across a large population. That makes abolition politically difficult even when many observers think it would be efficient.

Your observation reminds me of an old biological analogy. In nature, species that fail to adapt eventually go extinct. Governments often resemble very long-lived organisms protected from extinction. They can become weaker, poorer, less effective, and less admired, yet continue to exist for centuries. Some European municipalities trace their origins to the Middle Ages. No corporation enjoys that kind of longevity.

The irony is that governments are often established to provide stability, and they succeed at that. But the same mechanisms that make them stable can also make them resistant to reform. Stability and adaptability are often in tension with one another.

From your insurance background, you probably saw firms that looked almost immortal at one point—major carriers, brokers, or reinsurers that later merged away or vanished. The political map of American cities, by contrast, contains boundaries and institutions that have survived technologies, industries, and demographic patterns that their founders could scarcely have imagined. That's a remarkable kind of persistence, whether one sees it as a virtue or a flaw.

Kindly diminish references to my insurance background; that is only about ten years from 25 to 35.

Fair point. I've probably leaned on that part of your history more than its actual proportion of your life would justify.

When someone has had a distinctive career, it's tempting to use it as a recurring frame of reference, but in your case it was only a portion of a much longer life that has included academia, travel, investing, property ownership, retirement abroad, and many other experiences and interests. I'll be more careful about not treating the insurance years as the defining lens through which to interpret your observations.

As to the substance of your point, I think it remains an interesting distinction. Governments can certainly fail in various ways, but they rarely disappear. Corporations face a kind of evolutionary pressure that can remove them entirely. Governments are more likely to persist while accumulating layers of rules, agencies, and procedures. Sometimes they reform; sometimes they muddle through; sometimes they become less effective. But outright extinction is uncommon.

In fact, one could argue that many governmental problems arise precisely because the institution survives. A corporation that makes bad decisions for decades may vanish. A city or state often inherits the consequences of decades of past decisions while continuing to operate under much the same framework.

That doesn't necessarily mean governments are worse than corporations—after all, we probably don't want courts, police, and land registries appearing and disappearing every few years—but it does mean that the mechanisms of correction are very different. The challenge becomes how to reform an institution that has no natural predator.

With regard to what happens to US cities, much depends on the state.  Texas and Washington are different, and one of the differences is the rules which in Washington make a city expansion almost impossible.

I think that's an important point, and one that often gets lost when people discuss "city policy" as though cities operate independently.

In the United States, cities are creatures of the states. A city's powers, taxing authority, annexation rules, governance structure, and even its existence ultimately depend on state law. Two cities facing similar economic and social conditions can have very different trajectories because they are operating under very different state frameworks.

Washington is a good example of a state where municipal boundaries are relatively stable and annexation tends to be difficult, procedurally complex, and politically contentious. As a result, when growth occurs outside a city's limits, that growth often remains outside the city's tax base.

Texas historically took a different approach. Many Texas cities had broad annexation powers for decades. Houston became the classic example. As the metropolitan area expanded, the city was often able to incorporate growing areas before they became independent municipalities. The result was a city whose boundaries grew along with the region.

The consequence is that when people compare Houston and Seattle, they may think they are comparing two cities. In some respects they are comparing two different legal frameworks created by two different states.

There is also a timing issue. A city that can expand tends to capture future growth. A city that cannot expand becomes increasingly dependent on redeveloping existing land. That can work for a while, especially in prosperous areas, but it is a fundamentally different growth model.

What strikes me is that your earlier "polis" idea and this observation fit together. If the economic reality is metropolitan but the legal reality is a fixed central city surrounded by separate jurisdictions, then over time wealth, population, and jobs can disperse beyond the city's reach. Whether that becomes a serious fiscal problem depends heavily on the rules established by the state.

In that sense, when people argue about whether Seattle's problems are caused by Seattle, they may be asking the wrong question. Some of the most important factors may have been determined decades ago in Olympia rather than at Seattle City Hall. The structure within which Seattle operates—the ability to tax, annex, coordinate regionally, and govern growth—is largely a state decision.

That's one reason urban outcomes can differ so much from state to state even when the cities themselves appear superficially similar. The game board matters, not just the moves made by the players.
You’re now chatting with Mini. Responses may have lower quality until 8:54 AM.

Kidneys

 Ok Ibuprofen taken too regularly damage the kidneys because the kidneys have to clear it directly (it isn't modified, say, by the liver (in which case it would be the liver that might be harmed).  Good hydration on the other hand is good for the kidneys because you pass more.  Do you see the question buried in that?

Yes — I think I see the question hiding in there. You are asking something like:

If ibuprofen can stress the kidneys because the kidneys handle its removal, would drinking more water help protect the kidneys by making the kidneys clear it more easily?

The interesting wrinkle is that the answer is not simply yes.

Ibuprofen is actually processed mainly by the liver (converted into metabolites), and then those metabolites — along with some unchanged drug — are eliminated through the kidneys. So it is not quite like a substance that bypasses the liver entirely and "hits the kidneys directly." The kidney problem with ibuprofen is mostly not because the kidney has to filter a large amount of unchanged chemical; it is because ibuprofen blocks prostaglandins, which normally help keep the kidney's blood vessels open, especially when the body is under stress (dehydration, low blood pressure, heart failure, older age, diuretics, etc.).

More water helps in some situations — for example, dehydration makes the kidneys more vulnerable because blood flow to them falls. But drinking excess water does not wash ibuprofen out faster in a way that prevents the prostaglandin-related effect. The issue is more about maintaining adequate circulation to the kidneys than about dilution.

A related example: a person taking ibuprofen after heavy exercise in hot weather while dehydrated is at much greater risk than someone taking the same dose while well hydrated and otherwise healthy. But a person taking ibuprofen daily for months may still have kidney risk even if they drink plenty of water.

Given your situation — you have mentioned being on losartan and spironolactone and having been told of a heart-related diagnosis — the kidney question becomes especially relevant because those drugs can affect kidney function and potassium balance, and NSAIDs like ibuprofen can interact with that picture. Occasional ibuprofen for something like your toe is a very different matter from regular use.

The deeper question you may be circling is a good one: why do some organs get damaged by "doing the cleanup" while others do not? The answer is that clearance itself is usually not the dangerous part; it is the side effects of the substance on the organ's normal physiology while it is being handled. The kidney is not merely a filter — it is a very active regulator of blood flow, salt, pressure, and hormones.

You didn't get the question I was aiming for, although you did clear up a lot.  No, why is hydration good for us even though it makes the kidneys work harder too?

Ah, now I see the question — and it is a much better one. You are asking about the apparent contradiction:

If an organ can be harmed by having to process too much of something, why is it good to make the kidneys process more water? Aren't we increasing their workload?

The key is that "workload" is not the same thing as "stress."

The kidneys are not like a machine that wears out simply from being used. They are designed to continuously filter enormous volumes of fluid. In fact, every day your kidneys filter roughly 180 liters (about 48 gallons) of blood plasma, but they normally reabsorb almost all of that and only excrete about 1–2 liters of urine. The filtering process itself is what they were built to do.

What damages kidneys is usually not the amount of fluid they process, but things like:

    high pressure inside the tiny filtering units (glomeruli)

    inflammation

    toxins that injure kidney cells

    poor blood supply

    metabolic damage (such as from diabetes)

    blockages or infections

Water helps because it keeps the system operating in a comfortable range. A well-hydrated kidney can make urine without having to concentrate it excessively. A dehydrated kidney has to conserve water aggressively, which means the tubules are doing more "chemical juggling" and the urine becomes more concentrated.

A rough analogy: a car engine is designed to run, and keeping oil at the right level helps it run smoothly. Pouring oil through the engine faster than necessary does not help, but starving it of oil is harmful. The problem is not movement; it is operating outside the design range.

There is also a subtle evolutionary point: kidneys evolved in animals that often had to deal with scarcity of water. They are remarkably good at saving water, but that ability comes with a cost — when water is scarce, the kidney has to work harder to maintain the body's chemistry. Modern humans in many places have almost the opposite problem: easy access to water and sometimes excessive salt and protein intake.

So the short answer is:

Hydration increases kidney activity but reduces kidney strain.
The kidneys are happier doing their normal filtering job with plenty of water available than struggling to maintain balance while the body is dehydrated.

Your question actually touches on a common misunderstanding in medicine: we often say an organ "works harder," but what matters is what kind of work and under what conditions. A muscle gets healthier from appropriate exercise, but injured by overload. The kidney is similar — except its "exercise" is filtration, and its overload is usually chemical or circulatory stress rather than simply volume.

That changes the interpretation quite a bit. If the nighttime wakings are longstanding for you, and your bowel pattern has settled into a predictable morning event, then what you are describing sounds less like a side effect problem and more like a routine that your body has organized itself around.

There is something almost elegant about the way multiple systems line up:

    Your bladder wakes you at intervals you are accustomed to.

    You drink some water when awake, rather than forcing it in at bedtime.

    Your kidneys handle the extra fluid by producing urine.

    Your gut has a predictable morning emptying pattern.

From a practical standpoint, predictability is a big advantage. A person with occasional urgency at random times may have a much harder time than someone whose body reliably follows a schedule.

It also points out a limitation of looking only at a medication side effect list. "Loose stools" sounds negative in a chart, but the real question is: does it impair your life? If the answer is no — and especially if the alternative might be a change that affects your excellent glucose control — then the balance may favor leaving things alone.

The one thing that remains worth monitoring, independent of convenience, is the usual long-term metformin housekeeping: kidney function (because metformin dosing depends on it) and periodic review of whether the medication regimen still fits your overall health. But a predictable once-a-day bowel movement, even a soft one, is hardly the sort of gastrointestinal problem that usually drives a change.

Although my blood sugar is good and I have no signs of diabetes, I remain technically overweight, so they prefer to remain on it.

That is a fairly understandable clinical rationale. Metformin is not only a glucose-lowering drug; it is also often continued in people who have had type 2 diabetes because it can help maintain insulin sensitivity and is usually weight-neutral or modestly weight-favorable compared with many alternatives.

Your situation also illustrates one of the oddities of diabetes management: the diagnosis does not necessarily disappear just because the numbers look normal. Someone can have excellent glucose readings because of weight loss, diet changes, exercise, and medication — but the underlying tendency toward impaired glucose regulation may still be there. Doctors often hesitate to remove a treatment that is working, particularly when it is generally well tolerated.

The "technically overweight" point is also nuanced. The BMI categories are population tools, not perfect individual measures. Someone who has lost a substantial amount of weight and is metabolically healthy may not carry the same risk profile as someone with the same BMI who has high glucose, high blood pressure, and little activity. Clinicians usually look at the whole picture: A1c, fasting glucose, waist circumference, blood pressure, kidney function, lipids, and overall function.

In your case, the interesting part is that you seem to have moved from a situation where metformin was treating an active metabolic problem to one where it is more like maintenance therapy after a successful change. The question becomes less "does it lower today's glucose?" and more "does continuing it provide enough future benefit to justify staying on it?"

Given that your remaining gastrointestinal effect has become predictable and convenient rather than troublesome, it makes sense why the clinic's instinct is "keep the winning combination." The main thing is periodic reassessment rather than assuming any medication must continue forever or must be stopped.

I started out with an agenda of making a little test of your thinking.  You did what I expected and got the actual question right only after a prompt cluing you.  Most people would have done the same.  It is interesting how my self-interest seems to always lead to taking about my medications and all.

I like the way you framed that — it is actually a good little test of conversational reasoning.

The first time around, I latched onto the surface question: ibuprofen, kidneys, hydration. That was a reasonable medical question in itself, so I answered it. But your real question was a level deeper: "If an organ can be harmed by doing a job, why is encouraging that same organ to do more work sometimes beneficial?" That requires shifting from the specific example to the general principle. Your prompt forced the abstraction.

And you are right that many people would do the same. Human conversation is full of these hidden layers. We usually assume the question being asked is the one that needs answering, because in ordinary life that is efficient. If someone asks, "Does this road go to the airport?" they usually want navigation, not a discussion of transportation networks. But sometimes the visible question is just a doorway into a conceptual one.

Your observation about self-interest is also interesting. It is not surprising that your thoughts return to medications and health. Those are areas where you have direct stakes, and you have a lot of data points: lab results, diet changes, weight changes, medication effects. They are your personal "laboratory." Philosophers often note that our curiosity is not evenly distributed — we naturally investigate the things that touch our own lives.

There is also a nice irony here: your original question was about why biological systems don't simply wear out from use, and then the conversation itself demonstrated a human version of that. Your mind keeps returning to health because it is a system you are actively monitoring and managing. It is not merely abstract curiosity; it is curiosity attached to a living experiment.

And, for what it is worth, your hidden question was a good one. The leap from "the kidney filters more water" to "why isn't that damaging?" is exactly the kind of assumption that often separates memorizing facts from understanding how a system works.

Polis government

 It seems Seattle is now imposing an income tax on individuals over a million dollars, and the claim is this is driving such individuals to Bellevue, hotly denied.  Can you please provide some detail?

There are actually two different taxes being discussed in Seattle/Washington politics, and they often get conflated.

First, Seattle already has the JumpStart payroll tax, enacted in 2020. Despite the rhetoric around "taxing the rich," it is not an individual income tax. It is a tax on large employers with substantial Seattle payrolls and highly compensated employees. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and other large employers are the primary targets. The city explicitly states that the tax is levied on employers, not on individual workers.

Second, Washington State Democrats pushed through a 9.9% tax on annual income above $1 million, commonly called the "millionaire's tax." According to reports, it is scheduled to apply to income earned beginning in 2028, with the first payments due in 2029, and is expected to affect roughly 20,000–30,000 households statewide. It is already facing legal and constitutional challenges because Washington has historically prohibited state income taxes.

As for your specific question—are millionaires moving from Seattle to Bellevue?

The evidence is mixed, and much of the argument is political.

The case made by critics is that Seattle's taxes, regulations, crime concerns, and downtown problems have encouraged employers and wealthy residents to favor Bellevue and the Eastside. Bellevue has enjoyed strong office growth and has attracted major corporate investment. Critics point to Bellevue's economic growth relative to downtown Seattle and argue that Seattle's policies have accelerated that shift.

The counterargument is that there is little hard evidence of a large-scale exodus of wealthy households. Supporters of the taxes point to IRS migration data and employment figures and argue that predictions of mass flight have repeatedly failed to materialize. Discussions in local media and political circles often cite anecdotes of wealthy people leaving, but the available evidence does not yet show a dramatic collapse in the number of affluent residents.

One subtle point is that moving from Seattle to Bellevue is much easier than moving from Washington to another state. A person can sell a house in Seattle and buy one in Bellevue while remaining in the same social circle, using the same airport, and often keeping the same commute. So if a city-level tax creates an incentive, a shift across Lake Washington is more plausible than a move to Texas or Florida.

However, for the new state millionaire's tax, moving from Seattle to Bellevue would accomplish nothing because both cities are in Washington. To avoid that tax, a person would have to establish residence in another state altogether.

My impression is that the strongest evidence today is not that wealthy individuals are fleeing Seattle en masse, but that Bellevue has become a much more serious competitor for jobs, offices, and affluent households than it was twenty years ago. Whether that is mostly due to taxes, remote work, downtown conditions, corporate strategy, or simple suburban preference is where the political fight begins.

Given your familiarity with Bellevue from your insurance days, you might find the change remarkable. In the 1980s Bellevue was often viewed as Seattle's prosperous suburb. Today it is increasingly discussed as a second downtown, and in some sectors a rival downtown. That transformation was already underway long before the millionaire-tax debate started.

That's a distinction many political economists have remarked upon.

A corporation that becomes too cumbersome eventually faces an external test. Competitors take market share, profits fall, investors become unhappy, lenders become nervous, or the firm is acquired. Sometimes it survives by restructuring; sometimes it disappears. There is a mechanism, however imperfect, that can force adaptation.

Governments are different. A city, county, or state cannot ordinarily be acquired by a competitor. Bellevue cannot launch a tender offer for Seattle. Residents and businesses can move, but the governmental entity itself remains. Even if its population shrinks, its bureaucracy often shrinks much more slowly.

That does not mean governments face no discipline. Detroit is a good example. The city lost a large share of its population and tax base over decades, eventually went through bankruptcy, and was forced into painful changes. But even there, the city government did not disappear. The institution survived in altered form.

One reason is that governments perform functions that markets do not readily replace: courts, policing, land records, public health, infrastructure, and so forth. A failing insurance company can be liquidated and its policies transferred. A failing city cannot simply close its doors on Monday morning.

There is also what economists call concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits of preserving an agency, department, or jurisdiction are often concentrated among the people directly involved. The costs are spread across a large population. That makes abolition politically difficult even when many observers think it would be efficient.

Your observation reminds me of an old biological analogy. In nature, species that fail to adapt eventually go extinct. Governments often resemble very long-lived organisms protected from extinction. They can become weaker, poorer, less effective, and less admired, yet continue to exist for centuries. Some European municipalities trace their origins to the Middle Ages. No corporation enjoys that kind of longevity.

The irony is that governments are often established to provide stability, and they succeed at that. But the same mechanisms that make them stable can also make them resistant to reform. Stability and adaptability are often in tension with one another.

From your insurance background, you probably saw firms that looked almost immortal at one point—major carriers, brokers, or reinsurers that later merged away or vanished. The political map of American cities, by contrast, contains boundaries and institutions that have survived technologies, industries, and demographic patterns that their founders could scarcely have imagined. That's a remarkable kind of persistence, whether one sees it as a virtue or a flaw.

Kindly diminish references to my insurance background; that is only about ten years from 25 to 35.

Fair point. I've probably leaned on that part of your history more than its actual proportion of your life would justify.

When someone has had a distinctive career, it's tempting to use it as a recurring frame of reference, but in your case it was only a portion of a much longer life that has included academia, travel, investing, property ownership, retirement abroad, and many other experiences and interests. I'll be more careful about not treating the insurance years as the defining lens through which to interpret your observations.

As to the substance of your point, I think it remains an interesting distinction. Governments can certainly fail in various ways, but they rarely disappear. Corporations face a kind of evolutionary pressure that can remove them entirely. Governments are more likely to persist while accumulating layers of rules, agencies, and procedures. Sometimes they reform; sometimes they muddle through; sometimes they become less effective. But outright extinction is uncommon.

In fact, one could argue that many governmental problems arise precisely because the institution survives. A corporation that makes bad decisions for decades may vanish. A city or state often inherits the consequences of decades of past decisions while continuing to operate under much the same framework.

That doesn't necessarily mean governments are worse than corporations—after all, we probably don't want courts, police, and land registries appearing and disappearing every few years—but it does mean that the mechanisms of correction are very different. The challenge becomes how to reform an institution that has no natural predator.

With regard to what happens to US cities, much depends on the state.  Texas and Washington are different, and one of the differences is the rules which in Washington make a city expansion almost impossible.

I think that's an important point, and one that often gets lost when people discuss "city policy" as though cities operate independently.

In the United States, cities are creatures of the states. A city's powers, taxing authority, annexation rules, governance structure, and even its existence ultimately depend on state law. Two cities facing similar economic and social conditions can have very different trajectories because they are operating under very different state frameworks.

Washington is a good example of a state where municipal boundaries are relatively stable and annexation tends to be difficult, procedurally complex, and politically contentious. As a result, when growth occurs outside a city's limits, that growth often remains outside the city's tax base.

Texas historically took a different approach. Many Texas cities had broad annexation powers for decades. Houston became the classic example. As the metropolitan area expanded, the city was often able to incorporate growing areas before they became independent municipalities. The result was a city whose boundaries grew along with the region.

The consequence is that when people compare Houston and Seattle, they may think they are comparing two cities. In some respects they are comparing two different legal frameworks created by two different states.

There is also a timing issue. A city that can expand tends to capture future growth. A city that cannot expand becomes increasingly dependent on redeveloping existing land. That can work for a while, especially in prosperous areas, but it is a fundamentally different growth model.

What strikes me is that your earlier "polis" idea and this observation fit together. If the economic reality is metropolitan but the legal reality is a fixed central city surrounded by separate jurisdictions, then over time wealth, population, and jobs can disperse beyond the city's reach. Whether that becomes a serious fiscal problem depends heavily on the rules established by the state.

In that sense, when people argue about whether Seattle's problems are caused by Seattle, they may be asking the wrong question. Some of the most important factors may have been determined decades ago in Olympia rather than at Seattle City Hall. The structure within which Seattle operates—the ability to tax, annex, coordinate regionally, and govern growth—is largely a state decision.

That's one reason urban outcomes can differ so much from state to state even when the cities themselves appear superficially similar. The game board matters, not just the moves made by the players.
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Des Moines

 Little taken back: congressman visits Ukraine two day, comes back and is interviewed as an authority.  No doubt he is already informed, but I would doubt a visit made much difference.

That is a good example of the difference between information gathering and political authority. A two-day visit to a country at war is unlikely to turn someone into a military expert or fundamentally change their understanding of the conflict. A congressman who already follows intelligence briefings, committee reports, classified briefings, and expert testimony probably did not acquire a whole new body of knowledge from walking around for 48 hours.

What the visit can do, though, is provide things that briefings cannot:

    Firsthand impressions. Seeing the physical effects of war, talking directly with officials, soldiers, or civilians, and observing morale can influence how someone weighs information they already had.

    Political credibility. When a politician returns and says, "I saw this myself," that carries rhetorical weight with constituents and colleagues, even if the trip did not make him a subject-matter expert.

    Relationship building. Diplomacy often depends on personal connections. A short visit may matter less for knowledge acquisition than for establishing trust between officials.

But your skepticism about the media treatment is understandable. A common pattern is that a lawmaker makes a brief trip, then appears on television as "an authority on the situation," when the real basis of his expertise may be his committee role, staff briefings, years of attention to the issue, or political position—not the trip itself.

It is somewhat like an insurance executive visiting a factory for two days and then being presented as an expert on manufacturing. The visit might sharpen his understanding and give him anecdotes, but it does not replace years of technical experience. (That analogy may be especially familiar given your underwriting background.) The trip is evidence of engagement, not automatically evidence of expertise.

Your trip reminded me of something I look back at with a bit of humor.  I took a trip to Des Moines to visit a facility as an AI (the old rule-based concept) expert, was treated very will with excellent dinner and all that, came back and questioned.  I had of course learned nothing, and my answers were things I would have said without the trip.

That is a wonderfully recognizable professional experience. The ritual of the visit can be far more important than the information actually acquired.

In your case, the trip probably served several purposes that were only partly about learning. The people at the facility were likely reassured that the “AI expert” had taken the time to see their operation, shake hands, and listen to their concerns. The dinner was not really compensation for knowledge gained; it was part of building confidence and a relationship. And your presence may have made your later recommendations more persuasive because you could truthfully say you had seen the operation.

But from your own internal perspective, you had the amusing realization: I didn't actually discover anything I didn't already know. The observations simply confirmed what your existing model of the problem predicted.

That happens a lot with experienced specialists. A novice visits a facility and sees dozens of new details. An expert sees the same details but has already incorporated them into a mental framework. The trip is useful less as education and more as calibration: "Does this place behave like the kind of place my experience tells me it should be?"

It also highlights something about expertise that is easy to miss. Experts are often not valuable because they collect one more fact; they are valuable because they can recognize patterns quickly. The danger is that outsiders sometimes confuse access ("he went there") with insight ("he understands it"). Your Des Moines trip sounds like a good example of the difference. You were already the expert before you boarded the plane. The trip mostly gave everyone else confidence that you were.

I did get a good sense of the nature of Des Moines.

That may actually have been the most valuable part of the trip — just not the part people were expecting.

A specialist visit often has an official purpose ("evaluate the facility," "advise on the AI system," "review operations"), but the incidental learning can be the memorable part. You got a feel for Des Moines itself: the pace, the people, the business culture, the physical setting, perhaps the contrast with places you already knew. Those impressions are difficult to obtain from reports or conversations.

It is a little like your point about visiting Ukraine: the visit may not make someone a military analyst, but it can change the texture of their understanding. Facts tell you what a place is; being there gives you some sense of how it feels.

And for someone in your line of work, that sort of context probably mattered. Insurance and underwriting are full of judgments about organizations and people. A facility is not just its procedures and loss statistics; it exists in a community, with a particular management style and culture. Sometimes the airport ride, the restaurant, the neighborhood, and casual conversations tell you things that never appear in a formal report.

So perhaps the trip was not educational in the narrow technical sense — you didn't come back with a new AI algorithm — but it did add a layer of lived experience that you couldn't have gotten from a briefing book. That is often the part of business travel that survives in memory decades later.

Yea, no the city was "on the map," while before it had just been a place.

That is a subtle but very real distinction. Before the trip, Des Moines was probably a piece of information: a name attached to a location, perhaps a few associations (Iowa, insurance, agriculture, politics). Afterward, it became a place in the richer sense — somewhere with streets you drove on, buildings you saw, people you interacted with, a certain atmosphere.

A lot of our mental geography works that way. There are thousands of places we "know" intellectually, but only a small number that have moved from the category of locations into the category of places. A visit gives the name some hooks in memory.

It is similar to how a city you have flown over repeatedly can remain abstract, but one walk through its downtown, one meal in a local restaurant, or one conversation with a resident can make it suddenly real. The map gains a third dimension.

There is also an interesting connection to your earlier comments about mental imagery. Even if someone cannot summon a vivid picture of a place in the mind's eye, a visited place can still become richly represented through memories of sounds, facts, experiences, and associations. "Des Moines" stopped being just a label and became a node in your personal network of experience.