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A Quote From This Week
> If truth can not be found on the shelves of the British museum, where, I ask myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?
– A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
Something On My Mind
Banking, Software, and Reductive Modeling
While having a meeting at a grocery store that’s also a cafe this week, I came across this ATM:
What caught my eye was the part where it said "mini-bank". A "miniaturized" "bank". Somehow, I'm being instructed that this box, with some buttons and a number pad, should be understood as a bank, or at least a mini version of one.
What does a bank do anyway? This prompt to GPT yields:
> A bank is a financial institution that provides a variety of services to its customers, primarily centered around managing money. Here are some of the key functions and services a bank provides:
- Accepting Deposits
- Providing Loans and Credit
- Payment Services
- Wealth Management and Investment Services
- Currency Exchange
- Safekeeping Services
- Risk Management Services
- Facilitating Trade and Commerce
- Economic Stability and Growth
- Regulatory and Compliance Functions
Those are certainly recognizable features of what a bank does. What does this mini-bank do then? Ostensibly it only does the "Payment Services" part by facilitating fund transfers? However, if we think a bit more abstractly, surely it is also "Facilitating Trade and Commerce" and "Economic Stability and Growth" by providing liquidity through a small fee for moments of "O no, I need cash to make a trade and I don't have enough".
So to miniaturize here, we perhaps mean to satisfy some subset of the functions of the thing miniaturized? Who gets to decide what is or isn't a "mini" version of a bank? Suppose I lent my friend some money to buy a hamburger, am I then, at that moment, also a mini-bank?
At least, it does seem that the original meaning, as I was reminded while thinking about this, Automated Teller Machine (ATM), is perhaps more "accurate". It describes the specific function that is "automated" – the Teller at the bank who facilitates the function for withdrawing money ( no deposits for this specific one, so only partial automation).
Well, what are the "functions" of a Teller at a bank anyway? 1 At the heart, the ATM, seems to want to take the core function – withdrawal and deposit of cash, and decompose it into its key operations, package it into software (i.e. automated), and allow interface for some end-user. Since the bank is the designer of the ATM, it unfortunately doesn't consider the use case in the footnote above as a core enough feature.
On this, I arrive at another in/famous statement. Marc Andreesen's "Software is eating the world".
It appears that many, and truly many, things we do in the world, could be reduced to some key components, encoded in software, and re-presented back to ourselves as human users. This seems rather great. It allows for clear, definable, controllable inputs and outputs, and removes all the ambiguous human elements that create unnecessary fluff. Not to mention, you can make a lot of money by building tech companies that successfully champion a part of the world that software is eating. Why need a hotel broker when I can use Airbnb? Why call a restaurant for them to get my order wrong, when I can order on Uber Eats?
Surely, we've streamlined the world and made everyone's lives better?
A few weeks ago, I came across this post by Patrick McKenzie. Not only is it a wonderful post for those interested in Japanese working culture, but it also happens to give some remarkable insights into banking in Japan. Consider the following. 2:
> It was bank manager Taro and an older gentleman who introduced himself as the Vice President for Risk Management of the bank.
> [There were a] dozen stories which you wouldn’t believe actually happened about that bank. Taro correctly intuited when I started dating a young lady, and when we broke up, solely based on on my spending habits. He considered that part and parcel with looking out for my financial interests.
> Taro stopped me from doing a wire transfer back to Bank of America to pay my student loans during the Lehman shock because Wachovia had gone into FDIC receivership that morning. I told Taro that I didn’t have an account at Wachovia. Taro said that he was aware of that, but that I used Lloyds’ remittance service to send wires, and Lloyds’ intermediary bank in the US was Wachovia, which might or might not be safe to have money in at the moment. I asked Taro how in God’s name does a banker in Ogaki, Japan happen to know what intermediary banks Lloyds uses in North America _off the top of his head_, and Taro said, and I quote, “There exists a customer of the bank who habitually makes USD wire transfers using Lloyds and, accordingly, it is my business to know this.”
> Taro called me on March 12th, the day after the Touhoku earthquake, to say that he was concerned about my balance in the circumstances (I had cleared out my account to pay a tax assessment minutes before the quake) and, if I needed it, to come down to the bank and, quote, we’ll take care of you and worry about the numbers some other time, endquote.
> Taro eventually retired from his position, and as part of making his rounds, gave me a warm introduction to the new bank manager. He made it a point to invite me out for coffee, so that he’d be able to put a face to Taro’s copious handwritten notes about my character. Some years after that, a new manager transferred in. I popped by with a congratulations-on-the-new-job gift, mildly surprising the staff, but it felt appropriate.
> When I moved to Tokyo, I went to the regional bank’s sole Tokyo office, which exists to serve their large megacorp customers. They were quite shocked that I had an account with the bank (“Mister! Citibank is down the street! If you use our ATMs you’ll get charged extra!”), and even more shocked when I told them that I run a multinational software company through it. “Wouldn’t you get better services with Citibank or Mitsubishi?” The thought of switching never crossed my mind. Indeed, I can’t imagine anything that would convince me to switch. They don’t make numbers big enough to compensate for how much I trust my bank.
> Was I a particularly large account to the bank? Nope. It’s the same passbook savings account a 17 year old gets to deposit their first wages into. For 8+ of my ten years in Japan, my balance there was below $2,000.
There's something here, that's difficult, arguably impossible, to reduce to software. Even if GPTn could perfectly reproduce every event in this story, it still would not capture something ineffable. Poetry seems to be one of those mediums that is more suitable for pointing to the ineffable. This one, in particular, captures something beyond reductive modeling:
Come to the Garden in Spring.
There is wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate blossoms.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
– Rumi
In the "miniaturization" of our Bank, healthcare, education, motherhood, artists, or anything else, we may lose awareness of losing something along the reductive decomposition too. There is no such thing as a Christmas Truth, in a war fought with AI.
Media And Musings
Apparently, I was not able to arrive at something in the intersection of “Interesting media” and “I want to share something meaningful about it”, within the constraint of my week. Oddly, it’s not from a lack of ideas, and it’s stimulated me to have some interesting musings about what this category is meant for. I’ll see what the next iteration brings.
Apparently What Humors Me
Something very evergreen about:
> Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Even Know He Still Had
(Original From The Onion Apparently)
I'd love a playlist full of these.
- As it turns out, there are more.
A quote that made me feel like I'm having a stroke:
> )(() is a palindrome
A very helpful explanation from the person who said this:
let's reverse the string "abcd". to do it we write the characters in reverse order, starting from the last character, "d", then "c", then "b", then "a". the result is "dcba". palindromes are the same written forward and in reverse, like racecar, kayak, reviver, rotator, malayalam, civic, level, sagas… let's reverse the string ")(()". to do it we write the characters in reverse order, starting from the last character, ")", then "(", then "(", then ")". the result is ")(()". this is the same as the original, so it's a palindrome, even if it doesn't look like one (compare to the string "()()", which is not a palindrome)
It makes me think of this clip. Aside from just facilitating transfers, a Teller also functions as a weak point for threats like fraudsters. From the bank's point of view, this is a function to be eliminated of course and so the removal is sure to be celebrated, but what of the fraudsters who can no longer charm the machines into revealing sensitive institutional information!
To be clear, this is not to glamorize banking or service in Japan. There are plenty of what we know as common to human-ing experiences that lead to. The stories here exist right along side: "Unofficially, the bank doesn’t extend foreigners credit, as a matter of policy. You’ll find that is quite common in Japan."