Author: Julie

Categories
Politics

Day 1763 and Baumol’s Cost Disease Accelerationism

Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.

This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.

Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune

So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.

About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance

Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.

For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.

How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez

Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.

There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.

And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.

As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.

So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.

Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.

We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.

So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.

I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.

The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1762 and New Nodal Points

I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.

I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.

I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.

I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.

To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts

I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.

Put out a little value for people with your own skills and maybe that is the node through which you have the opportunity to see what they see and in return you both learn more together.

I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1761 and Give Me A Break

It has not been an easy year for me or my family. The struggle to find a path to a sustainable place of health feels harder than ever.

I am living in some type of thermodynamic hell. Everything I try comes with equally forceful reactions and I wish I could say more of them were positive.

Even when results look positive they have high costs that make me reconsider if I should have done it at all. Switching my immune suppression drug put my inflammatory markers in the best place we’ve seen them in years.

Alas it is so effective that I’ve had four major skin infections in 2025 of which four required going under the knife. And the fourth was caused by a small incision that was considered so safe and routine we almost didn’t consider antibiotics at all.

I just so badly want something to work in a way that doesn’t come with staggeringly high costs. Normally I’d link around to all the relevant posts but I just need a break so I’ll leave it as an exercise.

But can you imagine anything more depressing than having an infection on your ass? I sure can’t. I am stuck trying to keep pressure off of it while working on all the various projects of life and I am a slow healer.

I don’t even get to see if the HBOT is doing anything for my main concerns, as if it is we are only going to see it when I clear this crazy infection.

I suppose the good news is that one of the best treatments for high risk wound care is actually hyperbaric oxygen therapy so the positive and the negative are at least balanced.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1760 and Optionality or Commitment Issues

As I sat inside our hyperbaric chamber for my 26th sessions of oxygen therapy, my mind was on commitment. I like a routine and a plan and being locked in on my follow through.

I don’t recall when I was introduced to the concept of optionality, but it wasn’t something I recall being raised with. Despite being raised by hippies and yuppies,who themselves struggled with commitment, I never doubted that loyalty and stick-to-it-ness were crucial personal values. I don’t like to quit.

Maybe somewhere in my 20s though it became clear that many of the people I dealt with in “the big city” always had their eye on their next move.

Maybe it was campaigns like the World Economic Forum’s infamous “You will own nothing and be happy!”

Trends slowly put the meta structure of optionality as a construct into my mind. And it wasn’t too foreign to me.

We moved a lot as a child, and I never felt like I could get too used to anything because change was such a regular part of my life. I could reconcile being committed to always changing as the balance.

So the idea of always trying to add in additional optionality struck me as a little bit funny. Why would I always be looking for the door, or looking for my next move, or the next upward opportunity, when so much of what I longed for as a child was a basic sense of stability in my own home life?

Now, of course, the idea of optionality is baked into almost everything we do. Owning things is expensive, and financial challenges made the sharing of resources and assets like homes and cars seem perfectly natural to a millennial who had barely gotten by in the Great Recession.

But now, as I watch reality television like Love is Blind, a dating show designed to result in commitment, we see so much fear.

An inability to choose a path or to consider changing the path you are on to be with another seems to plague participants the further they take the franchise. Optionality is one thing but we’ve stumbled into a world where commitment is a foreign language.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1759 and Who Are We After Someone’s Death?

They say you shouldn’t make any significant changes after a death in your family. Grieving is a process and allowing oneself to feel the range of emotions in loss is important.

You might not feel your grief if you jump into something new. Making a change could be hiding your grief from yourself. And so I am trying to sit with my grief.

The loss of my father on the last day of the summer was both expected and painful. As I have had to find my own way to grieving, without being part of his memorial, I thought a lot about what life going forward meant as I honored our past and let him go.

I wondered about which parts of my history and my identity gave me my life. If I wanted to make changes in my future, or to broaden my horizons, what would it look like?

How could I be sure I was being true myself in the challenges of my chosen life and true to the deep and complex relationship I had with my father. All these questions arise.

Somehow I am happy. I feel more love for myself as I see the ways I tried to love my father, and how he tried to love me as his child.

Being who we are, means seeing the child in ourselves who wanted to be loved for who they were, while learning as an adult that acceptance is up to us, not the generation who birthed us. The liberation of birth anew.

I hope the many experiments I’ve run with my biohacking over the last two months are helping me stay in my body during this process. I am on my 25th hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy treatment today. Which is fortunate as I am healing yet another skin issue as I try to find ways to have the strength to be myself in my very challenging body.

And so I wonder, am I the same without my father as I was with him? I am always searching for ways to become better, stronger, more informed, more capable, more successful and ultimately I fear those are all synonymous with finding ways to be more lovable to him? I couldn’t always tell.

I’ve found myself wishing to indulge a past professional calling with a side project. I’ve been writing a beauty shopping column where I go deep on my autistic special interest in skincare and the business of appearances. It’s been making me happy.

I have even decided make a special offer founding members who join my first year as I wish share some of my own happy knowledge. For a nominal fee I’ll build a routine from my cosmetics library and decant and organize the perfect skincare routine optimized exactly for the life you are living.

And so I ask does this count as a change? Am I jumping into something new, even if it is small, too soon?

All I know is that it feels right and like a joyful offering, even if there are parts of me that hurt. Perhaps there is a good kind of change to be had in endings with new beginnings. A personal passion once put aside, reemerges to serve others.

I think that is something my father would have liked to see me do. I have pursued so many of the things I know he wanted for me in this life. I do have a future full of technical change and a portfolio focused on the future of computing.

And yet here I am feeling freed to show that some aspect of who I am as a woman does want to serve others. If it is in the cause of helping be comfortably in your own skin that seems rather a positive thing to become after this life change.

Categories
Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.

Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.

So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.

As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.

Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.

And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.

Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.

Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.

Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia

I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.

Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1757 and Best I Can Do

I’m a bit hard up today as my recovery from my latest adventure in biohacking has had more twists and turns.

I am incredibly prone to subcutaneous and deep tissue infections from even modest and safe procedures. It seems this will simply be my reality permanently if I stay on the very effect anti-inflammatory medication.

I keep hoping I’ll adjust to the Bimzelx and the skin infections will be less of an issue but I’m on my 4th skin trouble of the year and I’ve only just reached what’s considered a full loaded dose.

I really don’t know what to do about it as it’s a major full year long process to change a biologic and adjust to the dosing so I may have to live with it. My inflammatory markers are the best they have ever been it’s just that I’m constantly getting some new skin issue.

So I’ve switched up the antibiotics to be extra careful on this healing but my brain is beyond fuzzed, I’m in pain, and I’m quite tired so I’ll just have to let today be what it is and pray the new antibiotic gets me to a better tomorrow.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1756 and Oops I Did It Again

Oh baby baby! So it seems as if, in my infinite wisdom, I did not pay enough attention to the early warning signs from my Whoop biometrics and I did indeed need to worry about the fun and games of a subcutaneous tissue infection.

I swear that this IL-17 inhibitor drives me nuts. Despite its impressive effect on my inflammatory biomarkers, it leaves me very susceptible to skin infections. And I have to be constantly vigilant to the first signs of an issue.

I’ll be fine. I did in fact catch it before it turned into anything serious. Where I am at it’s easily treatable with a short antibiotic course that may formerly be prophylactic. My wound area had not shown any signs of spreading nor was I running a fever or otherwise exhibiting other signs of serious infection.

I just had crappy HRV numbers and high resting heart rate three days in a row and it’s not worth risking it. I threw back some basic antibiotics last night and woke up with a normal heart rate again. My HRV is coming up just a little more slowly. Glad I didn’t wait as this isn’t worth any amount of risk to me.

I comforted myself by working on my beauty blog where I’ve got routines coming along for founding subscribers and a fresh post about Shrinkflation at Sephora and a minimalist men’s routine on sale at Amazon.

Retailers are a bit twitchy and everyone needs to be shopping early is the message we are getting everywhere. It’s a weird time. Or at least the retailers need to encourage the top 10%. So if that is interesting to you go subscribe as I’d love to have you in my strange beauty shopping blog meets the business of appearance.

Or if you are feeling adventurous for an honestly embarrassingly low fee I’ll put together a custom routine for you from my sample library or go full autistic and decant you the perfect mix of potions and lotions to meet you precise lifestyle and budget. My autistic obsession is your gain. It’s so much for me for and your skin will look amazing.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1755 and Slow Healer

I am on a TMI roll this week so you will have to excuse this old blogger. If my n-of-1 experiments help even one woman struggling with her health, it’s worth it to me to embarrass myself in public by sharing the real details.

I’ve come consider this blog not just a personal experiment in daily writing, but my contributions to training the artificial intelligences of our future. I shall write women’s health into the Akashic records, even if I have to write every single day. Oh wait

Today I am moderately concerned about mg pace of healing and if I have contributed negative to it by increasing my strain modestly.

Yesterday I wrote “want to see something gross” about how maximalist approach to healing the incision site where we placed testosterone pellets.

I thought it was going pretty darn well and I had physical evidence with photographs to prove it. I did however have two days of poor biometrics which I had thought was a result of pushing myself physically a bit too hard while in my two days of menstruation. I

have rip-roaringly bad luteal phases (hence the exploratory hormone therapy to bring my testosterone to a normal baseline) but I have blessedly short menstruation that hits hard but doesn’t stick around. Aunt Flow knows she gets a weekend, and it ain’t a long one, before she has overstayed her welcome.

Now I’m going to show you something a lot worse than gross pictures of an incision site. I’m going to show you embarrassingly bad Whoop metrics. And now that I see them laid out I realize I probably should have asked my doctor earlier if I needed to go back on a prophylactic antibiotic just in case cellulitis was lurking. Like my god my HRV and heart rate are god awful right now.

Now they were a bit wonky this month but this is some danger Will Robinson territory. I honestly didn’t feel bad enough that I took it seriously.

I thought “eh Whoop has been sucking” for me. I thought this is just adjustment and the high heart rate is the testosterone is kicking in and my low HRV is just adjusting to finally having some energy. I feel genuinely energetic for the first time in years.

But today at a check up with another doctor they noted that I was at higher risk of developing cellulitis given my history over the summer with the abscess surgery and the panniculitus it had revealed. The side effects of the immune suppressive called Bimzelx I use as an inflammatory dampener seems to mostly manifest in skin infections. So either I’m just a slow healer and being paranoid or I’ve got to rock on with some amoxicillin to get the ill’in to stop.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1754 and Do You Want To See Something Gross?

My inner child finds the idea asking if “you want to see something gross” to be funny. Of course, I want to see.

Gore and violence don’t get this reaction from me. I dislike it in movies and in the real world. But to see gross and the weird in the real world. I get it. Maybe lots of humans thinks seeing gross things are cool.

I think it is a bit sweet. It is as a very human reaction go “ewww cool” when faced with non lethal wounds. Maybe it’s truer with boys than girls, but if a kid said “do you want to see something gross?!” in Colorado when I was a tween the answer was a rousing yaah! Gross things are cool.

Maybe it’s a type of survival mechanisms where if we can learn more about what is lethal, and lethal injuries look like, it then improves our Darwinian fitness. We judge risk more accurately.

Flesh wounds need proper care and do turn out absolutely fine. And boy have we improved on the science of wound care since I was a kid. We have evolved past the bandaid.

When I first did my wilderness incident first responder training, I went worried I’d find the injuries we’d be treating emotionally challenging.

But even in a hard situation like a fire burn or the dermis getting sliced open, I still had a bit of that bravery of a little girl. That is cool! The bravado of a human who believes we can fix it

If you enjoy a story of plucky Rocky Mountain woman learning to do emergency care for herself and her community I’m glad we shared this time together.

Hopefully you never need these emergency skills. We take learn the risks and practice for them so we may never experience them.

So if you don’t feel this way, I’m giving you your ticket out of here. Stop reading now. But if you want to see something gross stay on.

For those who who are like “actually I want to hear all about getting your left butt cheek sliced open” to raise and normalize your testosterone levels by injecting tiny pellets of hormones though a steel dart gun via the scalpel entry point. Then it’s time to see something gross.

This is my wound on Wednesday morning after I had the procedure. It’s much bigger a slice than I’d expected but first time practitioners (I asked for the experiment) and while the treatment is safe across most vectors, I was a nervous immune compromised patient who prepared for the worse.

So this a real 10/10 “let’s see how it goes from here” experiment especially if the returns it delivers are real. I hope for the energy, pain tolerance and healing benefits the average patient sees

Now I am lucky enough to be an owner and finally user of my very own hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy. I wrote about it at length through trade wars and trips to Istanbul. We finally got the OxyRevo from China last month. I intend to upgrade to an HPOTech in our finished medical space (I believe HPOTech the best on the market currently)

So I am using a 90 minute full 2 atmosphere protocol already as I go went this treatment. I had also begun testing the GLOW stack from a peptide spot where I trust the owner. I’m helping him test. And this is the recommended stack for recovery.

.01 of the GLOW stack which is a regenerative peptide therapy with three peptides—BPC‑157, TB‑500, and GHK‑Cu—it was made to promote healing, tissue regeneration, and collagen production,

So I am absolutely throwing the gold care package at this. I am taking collagen and biotin, we’ve got the local food and the lack of seed oils, we’ve got the best current standard for peptides on injury and surgical recovery.

And somehow I am still scared. I never heal well or easily. I bruise easily and badly. I was so slow this summer to heal from an abscess surgery. I took a risk and I worried.

But I woke up this morning and my open wound has closed and the bruising has retreated in just five days to this. I’ll be in the scar mitigation territory in no time, and soon it won’t even be visible to the naked eye.

Day 5 of recovery from testosterone pellets

Progressively, the wound has moved from acute bruising and erythema toward decreased inflammation and resorption of bruising, with steady wound closure. Monitoring should continue, but the pattern suggests healthy tissue repair

So I hope you enjoyed seeing something gross. As it is keeping less and less gross by the minute.