Year: 2025

Categories
Chronicle Preparedness Travel

Day 1584 and Sunday Chores

I missed spring cleaning due to some unexpected travels. Part of that was by design, as a gnarly mold issue required mediation that we decided was best missed by my annoyingly fragile immune system.

You wouldn’t think galavanting across Alexander’s Empire by car would be a reasonable way to avoid mycotoxins and you’d be right but I also like to learn what’s happening in the markets in a visceral manner.

No finer way to come to grips with the breakdown of trade and empire than racing across a continent to understand a supply chain amirite?

In January we began the process of acquiring a hyperbaric chamber for personal use and a medical spa. We figured we were well ahead of the process and like many folks who buy products made in other countries we figured better to get it done before another trade was kicks off.

And then the tariffs came. Whenever you were ordering or transiting goods you were scrambling. I’m scrambling now at home to make sure the household is set up for whatever empty shelves and shortages are ahead but it’s hard to predict.

And so I spend my day planning and cleaning and running errands and generally cleaning up. I hope the mold issue managed as I’m certainly being exposed now. As you might imagine I’m trying to keep windows open and as dry as possible.

Categories
Finance Politics Preparedness

Day 1583 and The Last Tariff Free Shopping Spree

I remember the weeks before Covid-19 lockdowns hit vividly. My father went on international cruise, my husband was traveling domestically right up to the last week, and I got yelled at on the internet for discussing buying masks, toilet paper, and disinfectant.

My father got stuck in a Latin American port as borders closed, Alex made it back with mere days to spare before New York locked down and I had a well stocked pantry & dry goods cabinet. I was a prepper long before it became the default of normie Americans after Hurricane Sandy.

So naturally I’m trying to get ahead of the impacts of the tariff war as the last container loads of goods ordered before “Liberation Day” are sold through by American retailers.

Items Most Likely to Experience Shortages if the Drop in Container Cargo from China Persists
If the current sharp decline in container cargo from China to the United States continues, Americans are likely to see shortages-and significant price increases-across several key product categories. This is due to a combination of record-high tariffs (up to 145%) and a dramatic reduction in shipping volumes, with estimates suggesting a 60% to 80% drop in imports from China

Via Perplexity

Clothing basics, footwear, and cosmetics are at at the top of the list of potential shortage areas so I stocked up on underwear, socks, Aquaphor and hit “order” on the two pairs of athletic shoes I’ve had languishing my cart for months.

Amazon must be having a great couple of weeks.

I also decided to treat myself to a few Landmark classics including Julius Caesar and Alexander’s Campaigns. If the empire is falling I may as well revisit some of my schooling.

Plus I just returned from a run through Alexander’s empire so perhaps this is a moment to ground myself on the rise and fall of empires. I never did much care for Rome though but I didn’t expect to be born in a late republic.

I don’t know how this particular supply shock will play out and I feel lucky to be able to spend on thing’s frivolous and essential. Dry feet and military history are as good as any a thing to have on hand. I imagine we will have more serious inventory to do but it’s better to take the first steps.

Categories
Aesthetics Emotional Work

Day 1582 and High Budget Androgny

One aspect of my personality that seems to most confuse other people is my appearance and my identity don’t meet their expectations.

Sasha Chapin (whose writing I’ve found useful many times) had an interesting Tweet today that made me consider how this contrast has potentially worked in my favor

So I have a theory that for most people, men and women, peak attractiveness in a hetero context involves high-budget androgyny

Low-budget androgyny: not inhabiting either gendered energy


High-budget androgyny: inhabiting your own fully, and a bit of the other

I’ve generally presented myself in a normative feminine manner. I’ve leaned into long hair, skincare and cosmetics. Yet all of my interests are masculine coded. I like economics, technology, and science fiction.

Sascha confirms that this would fall into his high budget androgyny conception. I am inhabiting an embodied aesthetic that is fully within the feminine while my intellectual interests code me into “other” lightly.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1581 and Demand for 15 Friends

We live in an endless scroll world of relational voids. The ways we consume content has now surpassed even the worst fears of media theory greats like Marshall MacLuhan and Neil Postman.

Amusing ourselves to death is no longer a fear but a practical reality. So we spot auto playing clips divorced from context of tech CEOs revealing ever more horrifying statistics about how degraded our conditions have become.

I have no idea if this interview pull quote is from the frat bro former addict Theo Von who so likable interviewed Trump or from Dwarkesh the 24 year old artificial intelligence wunderkind. Context collapse indeed.

Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.”

I think this tidbit on its own is open to a number of interpretations as our Bowling Alone era has been with us before Facebook.

We forget how inelastic social capital can be. We’ve got a statistic (not even a nod to Dunbar’s number) about friend demand without addressing the issue of friend supply. Of course, it’s not an economics problem as humans are not fungible.

We have a cultural and psychological problem on our hands when it comes to our new relational world as it’s mediated through digital intermediaries. Maybe you can make a case that there is a demand for 15 more people to improve your social standing.

You’d think the man at the head of the corporation who owns Instagram would understand status signaling. For plenty of people having friends is about your social position.

Fortunately for most of us friendship is still about feeling understood and caring enough to understand another person. Which an artificial intelligence is probably capable of doing. But that’s a different story.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1580 and Learn By Doing

Techne and episteme are foundational concepts in Greek philosophy. Practical knowledge and theoretical understanding are interwoven for humans.

Aristotle distinguished between five virtues of thought: technê, epistêmê, phronêsis, sophia, and nous, with techne translating as “craft” or “art” and episteme as “knowledge”

Via Wikipedia

As I enjoyed a brief trip to the academy last week I am myself considering how much meaning I derive from knowledge or episteme comes from my enjoyment of applying and experimenting with techne in my daily life.

As I’ve been pondering my own thought and it how it will change in this new era of artificial intelligence I find a calling to practice the virtues of thought in all its forms.

I have a love of chemistry and its applications in beauty. I find virtue in aesthetics and I enjoy many practices within it. Beauty is virtue with a long cultural history. Feminine cultural traditions of potions, cosmetics, and ablutions are an intertwining of disciplines that reflect our embodied humanity within our natural world.

And so in considering how I like to solve for my own pursuit of personal beauty I engaged with a friends interest in pursuing a personal routine that matched her needs, her heritage, her time and her resources. I wrote her an issue and packaged together a set of samples across all those variables with my own library of cosmetics.

A routine of cosmetics based on a set of inputs for a particular girlfriend

I’d love to formalize a way of sharing my knowledge and the flavors of personalization as it’s an enjoyable process of inputs with clear joyful outputs that I hope makes the daily life of someone better. And that might be how I teach myself the use of some new tools.

A Pareto optimal skincare test for under $100 a year
Categories
Chronicle

Day 1579 and Marking The Days

Everyone has their own zero day for something. I’ve been writing for one thousand five hundred and seventy nine days in a row. It is 2025 Anno Domini aka the year of our Lord. It has been 100 days since Trump was sworn back into office as President.

I’m sure someone is celebrating 100 days of sobriety. I’m sure there is a couple celebrating 10 years of marriage today. A totally ordinary day in the spring likely had any number of events big and small being noted today.

We seem to like marking the passage of time quite a bit. For Aristotle fans memory is key to the cultivation of techne. We mark events in order to remember them so that they may be handed down to the next generation. We repeat so we remember.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1578 and Dark Start

On April 16 Spain hit its first weekday of 100% renewable power on the national grid. Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica was celebrated for this milestone. Today Spain and Portugal went dark as the grid collapsed after a massive dip in demand.

“We have never had a complete collapse of the system,” Sánchez said, before detailing that at 12:33 p.m. on Monday Spain’s power grid lost 15 gigawatts, the equivalent of 60% of its national demand, in a matter of five seconds. Via AP Newswire

Via Andi Alb

As was lucky enough to finally meet Lynne Kiesling in person at Renegade Futurisms last week energy grid security and market coordination was top of my mind as I learned of the disaster in Spain

Lynne is an economist who studies transactive energy models. She is a fantastic Twitter mutual for any scholar of market dynamics so naturally she was the first person I thought to ask about untangling what may have happened.

She points out that oscillations are an issue in all power systems which means it will take some analysis to tease apart the combination of atmospheric conditions, system inertia and other factors which caused so much demand to drop off at such speed.

If you are interested in a perspective of a white hat hacker of power grids on the problem of synchronization this thread is worth a read.

A drop caused automatic failsafes to kick in and disconnect things. It takes so long to restart after these failsafe crashes because we haven’t engineered it to be easy to restart the grid aka a “black start” as power plants require power from the grid to operate themselves.

But it’s alas not really much of a question that grids need reworking for managing our energy mix. I found this tweet to be both humorous and helpful in understanding why.

Me: What if the renewables underperform more than modeled, and spare capacity can’t keep up?

Founder: You have emergency load shedding.

What’s that?

Cascading blackouts.

AGM on Twitter

Cascading blackouts may be the better outcome. What Spain experienced today was what happens after the fail safe of cascading blackouts occur.

Javier Blas has an excellent opinion piece in Bloomberg about the need for electricity realism as our future demands we overcome the culture wars of the last decades of energy transition.

It’s clear electricity security issues are on the rise. On March 20th Heathrow Airport was shutdown after a single transformer at an old substation caught fire. That looks minor in comparison to an entire country going dark. Imagine what could happen as we head into summer and experience the grid pressure of a hot summer day.

Categories
Travel

Day 1577 and Losing My Shit

I had an incredible long weekend in Boulder as a speaker at CU’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization’s conference Renegade Futurism. It was an exceptional group of people and I felt privileged to learn from them.

Alas the universe must have needed to even out this wonderful high with a few lows. My husband and I’s trip back home to Montana was quite bumpy.

After a late evening of socializing, we left packing for the morning. We are both teetoholers but when you are old enough just staying out later than average can deliver a hangover.

We quickly packed up, skipped showering (drought flow shower heads take too long to get you adequately clean) and I quickly inhaled a coffee and bagel to take with my antibiotics.

I knew we were in trouble as soon as we stepped into the Uber. It smelled intensely of body odor. The stank of unwashed upholstery, swampy body pits and a poor suspension combined poorly with exhaustion and an ersatz hangover. I began to feel car sick.

I tried a nausea medicine called Zofran. It wasn’t enough. I attempted to express that I needed us to pull over so I could throw up. I opened the window and begged for a disposable baggie. The driver was tuned out. Alex rushed to find anything that would do.

He found a foldable nylon pocket bag from a Japanese airline he keeps on hand in his luggage for emergencies. Alas I needed it three times. The car drove on even as I kept evacuating my stomach into this reusable bag.

We arrived at Denver International Airport and Alex rushed out to throw out the treasured Nippon Airways pocket bag lest the smell further exacerbate the issue. A loss but better than getting vomit all over the Uber. Not that the driver was paying attention. Oddly.

After unloading we checked multiple bags. We’d both come from long trips and figured it was a safe simple single flight. The United fancy status counter gave us trouble about being five pounds over on one bag. The label needed re-printing as the confused newly hired counter service agent struggled with the overrides for frequent fliers.

It’s an hour and a half from Denver to Bozeman so we felt safe checking all of our bags. And indeed our normal carry-on bags made it home with us without issue as checked luggage. They got off the airplane quicker than we did.

But as you probably guessed the 5lb overweight bag that took so much time to get labeled correctly. Yeah, it was never even put on our airplane. It was still in Denver. We have a tracker in the bag so we knew where it was. United asked us to report as lost as part of their procedure for getting it to us.

I’d list my shit twice now in one day. Hopefully the bag it makes it onto the next flight as it has quite a number of irreplaceable items.

And because things happen in threes, as I unpacked what luggage I did have I discovered that my eye medication was missing. I last remember seeing it in our hotel’s nightstand cubby. I may have packed it in the liquids bag in the lost luggage so there is a chance. But I don’t recall packing it. It’s Turkish so I’m not even sure if I can replace it.

I lost a lot of shit today. Hopefully I get it all back. Well except for the stomach problem in the car. I hope that never happens again. That is shit I’m happy to have lost.

Categories
Community Culture Politics

Day 1576 and Fight For The Future

I am saddened by the protective conservative ethos of some of our cathedral elites. I was filled with pride to hear multiple distinguished professor discuss their love of Boulder as emblematic of the kind often town we should all aspire to live in.

Boulder is a truly special town. Alas I have to question why it is that scholars with security and prestige can afford my hometown but their children’s generation couldn’t.

I am deeply saddened by the rising costs of my childhood town. We come back during the pandemic. When starting out my life twenty years ago I left my home as expenses rose.

My family didn’t own property. Regular people moved to other towns. Those who bought early fight to keep things. As they are. So only the wealthy, often conservative socially or economically, but generally institutionally secure elders own the town and no one else.

These preservation minded wealthy, either virtuous liberals or cultural conservatives want to preserve the values that created Boulder. The irony is not lost on me that the futurism of going back benefits the past entirely at the expense of the future.

But what moral or political good could there be in your perfect town and perfect conservation of certain mores if the children moved away.

You live in a garden made by weirdos and hippies and shined it into an expense that their own young cannot participate in it. Hippies and engineers produced a counter culture and turned it into a luxury good they did not uniformly pass down.

Boulder became a luxury good. I grant I could have a small piece of that. But would we flourish? Our elder elites keep their houses and smugly advocate against change to house even their own children. This change that necessary for the future their children will live in. We must be able to build for it.

I miss Boulder but I don’t miss this smug elitism of virtue. We chose to have a life where we could have a house and land and space for our lives and a regulatory climate where we could build the technology that will shape our future. I am sad it wasn’t going to be Boulder. We’ve lost Boulder to the security of the past and it’s expensive maintenance.

Bozeman is now the Boulder of the 90s. And I want to build up its future through the efforts of its industrious citizens and their ambition for building a future.

A forward thinking and growth focused governor introduced a future of building things with tools and technology and owning those benefits together. That the vision I want for Colorado and for Boulder.

Pairing his vision with two aesthetically conservative growth skeptical perspectives helps us realize the large gaps in values. And so I despair for the fact that I can never go home. So I must fight for my future. Which is I suppose what Renegade Futurism is all about.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

I spent my day at a conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Bensen Center for the Study of Western Civilization. It’s my hometown university and while I never studied there I was greatly enriched by its traditions of public and community programming. The land grant universities educated Americans like me even if we never attended them.

I suppose this is silly of me but I didn’t think an academic conference would actually be all that academic. I am used to financial forums and media shined up environments where doing the reading is sadly not a prerequisite. Academics very much do the reading. Or we said at my alma mater “that’s all very well in practice but how about in theory?”

I felt a little silly as the lone person on my panel who actually worked in industry and felt a little more acutely how absolutely unprepared our technical industry is for the task of running our elite institutions. We have on the ground knowledge and they have a very firm grasp of Hegel and Gransci. It’s a tension that has come to a head before.

And yet here our technical elite are gaining power and and a seat at the table and congratulations we’ve finished the long march through the institution. And somehow you still lost. We aren’t any closer to socialism or social justice. You know what happens in the dialect resolution next? Fascism. It’s like why pay the six figures for the degree if you don’t even read. Champagne socialists the lot of them.

But I’m also struck at just how divorced our academics are from the reality on the ground. We had an industrial class that founded private institutions that clashed with our empire elites before. How do you think we ended up with Stanford and the University of Chicago? Why do we continue this dance of institutional ownership?

And yet the cycle continues and we come up with new readings and new interpretations of how things should be optimally done. We have moral traditions and religious traditions and I’m sure this is an exhausting time to consider a new Pope so I’ll go light on my Catholic friends. Protestants just don’t understand. The future has arrived. You just didn’t notice it.