Love in Midlife

I don’t think we are exactly in the “honeymoon phase” anymore, now that it has been a little more than four months. But the fact that I have chosen to write about it as the subject of my first blog post since April 2018 (where did the months go?) is probably proof in itself that my relationship with my Tesla is much deeper than mere infatuation.

I decided long ago that when it would be time to retire my Mini Cooper Countryman, which served me really well through my law school years, I would buy a greener car. I was heavily leaning towards a plug-in hybrid. I had my eyes on a BMW 530e. But when we were ready to buy, the BMW dealership didn’t have any 530e in stock, even for a test drive. So purely on a whim, we ended up going to a Tesla dealership, and that turned out to be fateful! The car felt so comfortably familiar that I didn’t even feel like I was driving an all-electric vehicle. Plus the rear-view camera's continuous feed on the huge screen was thrilling during the test drive on Interstate 280. And with a range of 264 miles with a fully-charged battery, I didn’t see a reason for ‘range anxiety’ either—it was comparable to my Countryman's range. So I took the plunge and here I am--the proud owner of a Model S 90D for four months now.

I didn’t buy the car for the ‘0-60 miles in 4.2 seconds’ feature that allures some speed-seekers. In fact that level of acceleration literally gives me a headache. The autopilot feature is nice, but I rarely use it. What I absolutely love is the touchscreen in the console! It is super intuitive because it feels like you are just operating a laptop or tablet. Now I actually look forward to my commute to and from work, nearly one-hour each way. Audiobooks, regular radio, streaming content from the built-in Slacker internet radio app or music from my iphone—all these great options competing with each other for my attention is too gratifying to complain about traffic! And above all, nothing beats not having to go to the gas station--ever! I can just read about the US-Saudi Arabia relationship volatility (in the wake of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khasoggi’s brutal killing) without taking a look at the boards to check if the gas prices are reflecting the turbulence.

Elon Musk’s antics may not always make it easy to support him, but there’s no doubt that his company makes a hell of a car! 

P.S. 12/31/2018: I am certainly not alone in my admiration, as this article proves.

Multi-Format Binge Reading

I’ll be honest. I don’t think I read any book other than the textbooks during the first two years of law school. Or even if I did, I don’t remember. It was a blur—balancing law school, family and my job. I am not counting reading “Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR” by James Lardner in the spring break of my first year of law school. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I had to write an “optional” book report (to earn extra credit) on a famous lawsuit, the “Betamax case” on copyright infringement, that was the essence of the book.

In the third and final year of law school, I discovered audiobooks, and a whole new world of “reading” opened up for me! The first audiobook that I read was a behemoth of a science fiction, named “Seveneves,” by Neal Stephenson. I doubt if I would’ve finished the 880-page book but for the audiobook format. I used to listen to it religiously on my way to work, or pretty much any time I was driving. The first ten or so audiobooks that I read were all DVD or CD-based. It was a little inconvenient to insert a disc into the car’s CD player while driving. Also, I kept thinking that the newer cars won’t even have a CD player. So I explored a bit, and found Audible, the app that lets you download audiobooks into your smartphone and play it from there. After almost two full years of “reading” only audiobooks (with the occasional exception of a paperback or two), this year I am embracing multi-format reading in its full glory.

In February and March this year, I parallely kept reading a novel in hardcover (“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami), a biography on Kindle (“Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight), and listened to three audiobooks (“1984,” the classic dystopian novel by George Orwell; the hot-selling non-fiction “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff; and “Where the Red Fern Grows,” a young adult book about a boy and his beloved dogs---my son highly recommended this book so that we can share our experiences). This is the closest I have been to binge-reading, something that Bill Gates does encourage (https://yourstory.com/2016/12/bill-gates-book-recommendations/). I noticed the audiobooks were getting finished at the highest rate, thanks to the regularity of commute time listening in the car, followed by Kindle (because I could read in bed even when the lights are off). It took the longest time to finish the hardcover because you can only read when there is ambient light. But each format had other facets that could enhance or diminish the reading experience. 

The hardcover was so beautifully designed that it was a pleasure to hold it in my hand! (http://spinemagazine.co/articles/chip-kidd). Kindle was all about convenience. I actually missed seeing real page numbers in Kindle—percentage of how much you have read is not the same as seeing how many pages you have read. And the appeal of an audiobook is heavily dependent on whether you like the narrator’s voice and style of delivery. But at the end of the day, if you are addicted to reading, you will end up finding a way to read, one format or the other. 

So, happy reading, everyone!

Freezing Eggs: Part Deux

Today my newsfeed had a story about how liquid nitrogen malfunction at a fertility clinic in San Francisco may have damaged thousands of frozen eggs and embryos. This happened within a few days of destruction of nearly 2,000 eggs at a similar but unrelated facility at Cleveland. These two incidents got me thinking about a new argument that didn’t quite occur to me before when I wrote an article in law school on egg freezing. I wrote about the cons of freezing eggs in general, with a special emphasis on how taking advantage of employee-sponsored egg-freezing--while seemingly an attractive choice to beat the biological clock--can ultimately harm women. 

I understand that with technological improvement in cryopreservation, it’s just a matter of time before egg-freezing becomes more commonplace as an employee benefit. Non only the private sector, but even the US Army offers egg-freezing benefits to female soldiers these days. 

An employee probably cannot sue an employer when a malfunction at a third-party facility, such as the San Francisco and Cleveland clinics, destroys her frozen eggs. I would assume the employee would have the right to directly sue the facility for damages (an Ohio couple already sued the Cleveland facility for loss of their embryo). But a lawsuit is not always a comprehensive solution. 

The emotional cost of losing one’s frozen eggs/embryos could be many times more than the monetary damages that you can get from a lawsuit, especially if the woman’s chance of producing healthy eggs had declined significantly since freezing her eggs previously. Even if the woman is still biologically able to produce more eggs for freezing, it does not change the fact that each attempt at egg freezing takes a physical toll because of hormone therapy and other medical procedure that are involved. For example, a woman may suffer from ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome during the hormone therapy, that can pose serious health risk.

At the end of the day, the choice remains with women to freeze their eggs. But incidents like the cryo-failure in the fertility clinics in San Francisco and Cleveland should be a wake-up call for women to realize that they cannot fully hedge the risk associated with "timing motherhood" just by freezing their eggs.

Routine and Joy…and Artificial Intelligence!

I just finished my first book of the new year--Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “What Happened,” where she does a detailed post-mortem of her stunningly unexpected loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election. For someone who is not that much tuned in to politics, I was surprised how engrossed I was with this book from start to finish. The book’s appeal was in going beyond just describing what was happening on the surface during the election campaign—anyone who followed the media would have found that information from a number of other sources. What made the book unique is that it transcended into the deeper territories of human psyche--accepting the difficult challenge of going through the grueling schedule of a Presidential election campaign, knowing it would neither be pretty, nor easy, and then having to learn how to deal with a soul-crushing defeat and still find a purpose to keep going.

Midway into the book, in the chapter titled “A Day in the Life,” Clinton used a phrase “routine and joy.” She used this phrase to describe the approach she took based on a valuable piece of advice she received from President Obama to be able to successfully stick to a demanding campaign schedule spanning over nineteen long months—she announced her candidacy in April 2015 and the election took place in November 2016. “I put some routines in place to keep my traveling team and me as healthy and productive as possible through one of the hardest things any of us would ever do,” she wrote. “And we all tried our best to savor every moment that came our way—to find joy and meaning in the daily grind of campaigning.”

It really caught my attention seeing these two words “routine” and “joy” juxtaposed together —a pair that I never consciously thought of as being complementary to each other. When you set an ambitious goal to achieve a lot within a finite time, you got to have a routine. On the other hand, routine by definition is opposite of spontaneity. In my opinion, spontaneity and freedom from routine are some of the biggest sources of joy. So how can routine and joy not clash? But the context in which Clinton used them together made perfect sense. May be “routine and joy” should be my new mantra for every project that demands a long arduous journey, I thought. “Routine” for guaranteed productivity, and “joy” as the fuel to continue on to the finish line.

But that was not the end of it. In a subsequent chapter where Clinton expressed her worries about the widespread emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including jobs being threatened by AI, a new thought stirred in my head. Instead of giving equal importance to both routine and joy, can we not use AI to take care of the routine part of the job, leaving us to do the joyful part of it? 

In a recent article in Forbes, titled, “Millennials, This Is How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Your Job For Better And Worse,” the author presents both an optimistic (AI will create more jobs than it will replace) and a pessimistic (millennials will be most impacted by AI replacing their jobs) view of AI. I believe AI’s impact should be seen more in terms of change in quality of a job than change in quantity of available jobs. If a job can be redefined so that AI does the mundane routine part of the job, leaving the non-routine part to a real worker so that she finds her job a source of joy in her life, then everyone wins. 

Of course an argument can be made that if AI becomes sophisticated enough to handle even the joyful “creative” part of a job and costs the employer less, then at least some of the for-profit employers would not hesitate to employ AI without thinking much about how the joy is being taken away from a real human for the sake of efficiency. Perhaps the key to stay relevant in today’s job market is to embrace “routine and joy” together—the way that Clinton described it—rather than thinking that routine is the joyless part of a job that should be outsourced to AI. After all, AI is “intelligent,” albeit artificial.  You would not even realize when AI has "learned" to manipulate you so that you unwittingly give away some tasks to AI that were the sources of joy for you.

So millennials—make AI your friend, not your slave. Share both the routine part and the joyous part of you job with AI for a happy synergy.