I put a photo gallery from my Death Valley trip up. (Wishing for a left-handed camera…)

Not my usual day, so perhaps postworthy.

Last night I tried to head out to Hollywood, but my car wouldn’t start. Didn’t even do the “rrr-rrr” thing, and I verified I hadn’t left the lights on. So much for hitting the nightlife, spent the evening online instead. This morning was my annual physical, including a cholesterol test, so I was fasting that evening/this morning. I didn’t sleep well, woke up at 5 o’clock, had trouble getting back to bed and my alarm woke me. (Usually I have no problem sleeping and I wake on my own before the alarm.) The physical went fine, weight stable, no alarm bells, the doctor gave me cream for my athlete’s foot and probiotics for my GI. Get home, call Gabriel Towing, they refer me to Hillcrest Towing, who say they’ll be there in 15 minutes, and 15 minutes later they’re there. Amazing, I’m impressed, I’ve never had a tow come promptly before. Go to Subway for a lunch to break my fast (any “healthiness” of their sandwiches likely lost by me opting for the drink & cookies, ’cause I’m hungry). Bike around southern Pasadena, a light rain starts, I get twisted around by the twisty streets around Oak Grove and Oak Knoll. It’s a lot harder to navigate under low cloud cover, can’t see shadows or the mountains. Go home, wet, and the dealer says the non-hybrid-system engine battery bricked, looks like I’m out around $200 for repairs and towing.

There’s been noise and worry about deflation lately. The fear deflation sparks has always seemed strange to me, with the industry I know best — electronics — being both very energetic and highly deflationary. I’m familiar with the theory of how a deflationary spiral saps economic growth, with Japan’s economy being the prime example.

But looking closer at Japan’s economy: It was “stagnant”, by which economists mean its production was steady, and that steady production was actually quite high. If it weren’t economics, meeting an objective well and steadily would be considered very good, but the norm for economics is growth, so steady first-world level production is considered a failure. (Coming out of a deep recession, a steady production level doesn’t sound that bad after all.)

How much production do we want? Is this even the right question? I’m remembering Dijkstra’s complaint that programmers were proud of how large a program they had written, when instead they should have been ashamed at needing so much code to accomplish their goal. Is GDP as faulty a metric as LOC? Instead of being proud that we produce $47,000 while Japan only manages $33,000, should we instead be looking at why it takes us $47,000 to have a full and fulfilling life while Japan only needs $33,000? Are we really full and fulfilled with our lives, and getting a better life out of that $47,000 than Japan is out of its $33,000? Is increasing that number to $50,000 the best way to improve our lives? Or is there a better measurement that we should be looking at? Certainly more GDP helps immensely, it gives us more resources to spend on our goals, but I worry that treating GDP itself as the goal, we foolishly sacrifice “life value” for GDP, instead of spending our GDP to improve our lives.