Author: Julie

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1559 and Auto Pilot

I like routines as much as the next autist. Which is to say I like them quite a lot. But I don’t care for being on autopilot as I go through my day.

Being present feels better than disassociating from the moment. I can’t help but feel like running a subroutine with little attention is a bit like falling away from myself.

I was in a hyperbaric chamber oxygen treatment session today and found myself struggling to breathe. The chamber I am using has an oxygen concentrator which is meant to flow at 100%. But I could barely feel anything in the tubes and found myself taking the mask off to get a breath. The ambient air for comparison is 21%.

Had I been on autopilot maybe I wouldn’t have noticed. I think there was an issue with the valves in the chamber but the technicians didn’t seem to take my explanations particularly seriously.

They kept insisting that it automatically adjusted to my breathing. I kept trying to increase the flow using different breathing techniques like Wim Hoff and square breathing but nothing seemed to work.

I still feel off. Like I’ve got altitude sickness or pneumonia. I can’t catch my breath. If anyone knows anything about HPOTech I’d love to know if it being at 23% means anything so I can figure out if there is a valve issue or if that was just it being at the end of the session.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1558 and Basis Point Bullying

I’ve tried not to pay too close attention to the panicked aftermath of the new tariff regime.

I don’t trade the public markets actively and we’d already made preparations in our personal financial lives for a deleveraged dollar. It seemed clear where things were headed and weakening the dollar solves a couple problems for America.

I am a free trader. I believe in open markets as the most effective means we currently have at our disposal for large scale coordination that works with human nature.

Nevertheless the allure of central planning and collectivism is hard to resist for those in power. The market will adapt and find other ways of allocating assets but the wasted energy of a crisis frustrates investors. Damming the waters only impeded flow.

Each basis point drop saves America 1 billion according to Secretary Bessent. So we’ve an incentive to nuke 30 basis points and keep yields low. And yet the 10 year is still stubbornly high.

The exorbitant privilege of Bretton Woods comes with the fears of a centralized currency managed by technocrats who must give guidance to markets without providing too many surprises.

I grew up with a significant amount of skepticism around the federal reserve and its places to hippie parents and the University of Chicago but even I never thought I’d live to see this kind of test. And I am a Bitcoiner! Maybe Silicon Valley will finally find out what bargain we have with Uncle Sam.

Categories
Culture

Day 1557 and Care and Maintenance

The first stress test of our brave new order has arrived and the markets are pissed. Millennials will notice it shortly as tariffs are hitting Internet native homoglobo products particularly hard.

Many bills are coming due. And when you’ve let things go for too long it’s hard to maintain your current needs let alone build for new ambitions. America has a lot of debt and it’s time to crash the dollar.

But perhaps we can’t take care of anything in our lives and the currency is just a small part of our issues. The tariff crisis is a symptom of a wider issue of value in our own lives. We don’t treat any of the things in our lives as if they have value.

“Can the average house be maintained by the average person?” sounds like a nonsense question at first blush but I think it’s an important one?” Simon Harris

This is a problem across all areas of our lives. We don’t know how to maintain anything. It’s not just housing. People don’t know how to care for wool, leather or textiles any longer.

Many items in our lives are meant to last with care and maintenance. But these skills aren’t passed down any more. We stopped mending at home and it’s bubbled up from there.

Categories
Politics

Day 1556 and Market Mania and Mold

I’ve had a week of poor sleep that feels like it’s catching up with me. My mood is sour and my mind is mush. This sort of state leaves me with anxiety.

The running joke in the family is that anytime the markets are about to go off I feel it in my body long before it hits the Bloomberg terminal.

I vividly remember the day Silicon Valley Bank collapsed as I had a terrible migraine. I had a sense in the days before I can only describe as snowblind. An informational blizzard of such density and intensity it turned every vantage into a blinding sameness.

It’s possible I’m a mess as the whole week was a mixture of market mania thanks to “Liberation Day” tariffs along with other personal life challenges like mold remediation.

I feel anxious about everything which is to say I am not anxious about anything. It’s simply pervasive. If past market issues caused snowblindness this feels more like swamp gas. It stinks, is favored by conspiratorial types and is a fantastic excuse for seeing things you shouldn’t.

Categories
Politics

Day 1555 and Machiavellian Modernist

I finally decided to read James Burnham’s The Machiavellians this week. It felt appropriate what with all the tariff excitement and “Liberation Day” wish casting around mercantilism. As markets reacted and the chattering classes raised the volume it seemed like it was time to circle back on some core issues of power, realism, idealism and modernity.

The thesis of The Machiavellians, a term often associated with James Burnham’s book, revolves around the analysis of political power as inherently driven by elite rule and self-interest. The focus is on the practical dynamics of power, emphasizing realism over idealism. – Perplexity

As the Trump 2.0’s 5D chess defenders debate with the “tariffs are fucking retarded” economist and technocrat crowd it’s a good moment to contemplate if we’ve forgotten to care about the aims of a polis and whether it’s pursuing the people’s highest good.

Leo Strauss was the first critic of modernity I encountered with any weight. He saw Machiavelli as the first wave of modernity. Politics became practical tool as we lost our ambition for achieving justice, purpose and moral grounding through politics.

What good is an excellent technocracy if we only produce policies that send us careening towards charts with obscure symbolic meaning inscrutable to your average citizen? Meaning is stubbornly hard to measure.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha
Categories
Culture

Day 1553 and Omens

A friend recently texted excitedly about seeing spotted owl near their urban home. In cities it’s rare to spot these birds. Just a few days later we got our own visitor. A pair of owls hooting and calling to each other over the barn.

An owl above the eves

Owls have a fairly diverse set of meanings depending on your cultural setting. Classical western cultures associate owls with knowledge, learning and inner light.

The Japanese associate them with good fortune. Similarly in Hinduism owls are associated with Lakshmi and her abundance and wealth.

But the nocturnal predator has other meanings that are darker. In China they are omens of evil or misfortune. In Africa the undercurrent is more mysticism as the birds fly between worlds. Babylonians similarly associate them with Lilith and dark magic. We revere and fear what we don’t know.

I just learned that a group of owls is called a “parliament” which is seems balanced between good fortune and death. Government can go either way. Maybe it brings good fortune. Maybe it is death. Maybe it is both? Modern finance will bring back all kinds of divinations as we go forward.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1552 and Mold Updates

Over the winter we did a mold test on our bedroom after I had had a batch of sub-optimal bloodwork and flares in my autoimmune condition. We wanted to be thorough in assessing potential reasons for any issues from environmental to pharmaceutical.

I was suspicious that mold would be a culprit. Or perhaps I did not want it to be a culprit. Mold has always seemed like an excuse the professionally sick lean on like a crutch. You can imagine some worried well Goop reading white woman blaming mold.

I don’t know if this is engrained ableism on my part (lol) but no one wants to be that annoying sick woman with the litany of vague issues plaguing her life. And yes I fear this about myself because I do have to manage an autoimmune condition.

So I went into mold testing with some cynicism. It’s mike making a claim you’ve got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Sure both mold and fibromyalgia are real but I’ve learned from experience that you must avoid both lest you be seen as someone unserious.

The wall next to bed.

Alas it has turned out to be serious. It took most of the winter to work through the breaking down the walls part but once Alex began pulling back the walls it was dramatic and easy to spot.

The bedroom getting ripped apartment.

As it turns out the wall on my side of the bed has quite a bit of mold types growing happily. As best we can tell it must be some type of small leak in the pipes.

Gnarly white spores

There’s a couple hydronic heater pipes right by the baseboards so the current theory is maybe one developed a tiny pinhole leak for a bit that sealed itself back up. Don’t ask me about that one as it’s on Alex.

His plan for now is to remediate it, patch things back up, fog the room and have the carpets steam cleaned. Which is a bigger job than we might like but much better than it could have been.

Categories
Culture

Day 1551 and Jokes On Us

April Fool’s Day is just the worst. Practical jokes were much more enjoyable when telling the truth was still a widely accepted social norm. Our moment is one of a thousand falsehoods.

Our commitment to the truth and a shared sense of what separates truth from falsehoods has never felt shakier to me. It’s one strategic lie after another from all our institutions and leaders.

If you are living in our era of lies, half truths, and various flavors of misinformation & disinformation the idea of dedicated a day to falsehoods seems perverse. I don’t want to be on the Internet or a part of discourse on a day when deliberately lying gives you social capital.

Alas this is an ancient human custom in many places. The Indian festival of Holi, medieval Feast of Fools, and the Roman Hilaria are all early spring celebrations of pranks, jokes and foolishness. The prevailing theory dates to France and the change to the Gregorian calendar.

April Fools’ Day back to 16th-century France. In 1564, King Charles IX adopted the Gregorian calendar, moving New Year’s Day from late March (around the vernal equinox) to January 1. Those who continued celebrating the old New Year date on April 1 were mocked as “April fools” and became targets of pranks, such as receiving fake gifts or being sent on “fool’s errands.”

– Via Perplexity

I rather imagine that the religious traditions mentioned above all valued truth as a foundational virtue. To know the truth of the world and the truth of your soul are the twin ambitions of human life.

Perhaps I’m being too sensitive. Or too rigid. Humans are evolved primates and we play status games that involve deception in the entire primate family. But I’d still prefer that we communicate true information to each other as both a norm and as an aspiration. That’s not a joke.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1550 and Fools, Drunks & The United States of America

Americans are mere days away from the dreaded April 2nd tariff reveal and the mood could not be more sour.

If only America was a few good zoning reform bills further along. Then we could house 700 million more people and our Abundance bro moderate liberals would be in a better mood. Alas it’s easy dunking for most of us when Matty Yglesias weighs in late to the party

I’ve spent the last half decade preparing for a more chaotic world. How it would play out and what would be the driver was anyone’s guess.

I made plenty of bets that energy, compute, and decentralization would be the way in a multi-polar world, but I don’t want to count America out just yet. That’s why we made our last stand in Montana.

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Otto von Bismarck

The amusing bit of Trump’s mercantilism is literally only he and a small band of trade administration aids actually think this is sensible economic policy. While I know a tariffs bro personally and I appreciate him as a friend they know I think this approach is dubious.

You know it’s bad when even the king of outlier events Nassim Nicholas Taleb is fretting for Treasury Secretary Bessent. Who is at least qualified to manage the a massive currency crisis.

“He probably gets that whether tarifs make or don’t make sense is irrelevant: any ABRUPT introduction of steep tariffs must lead to a CASCADING & GENERALIZED price action.”

We are damned if you do not because tariffs are the wrong tool for this moment (though most of them are) but because markets like predictable things and cascading price action everywhere makes us dizzy.

Rather like the drunks and the fools mentioned by Bismarck, we’d better hope providence provides in this topsy turvy moment.