Category: Community

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Community

Day 1595 and Overflow

Bozeman is host to The Montana Festival this week. Alex and I are small donors to the festival as we are neighbors of one of the organizers Padden Guy Murphy. It’s a celebration of Montana’s many industries and people as we work together to build a better future.

Montana Festival is an annual celebration bringing together the top entrepreneurs, architects, business leaders, startup operators, innovators, artists, investors, culture creators, designers, community builders, movers, shakers and policymakers from across Montana and around the world to forge new friendships and catalyze Made in Montana ideas, projects, companies, and policy solutions to positively shape our shared future.

It has alas been raining to beat the band since the event started. At the welcome party last night literally the sound of the rain beat the sound of the band. This didn’t stop the band or anyone else from having a lovely time. Just raise your voice and have a good time.

Thankfully I’d taken Benadryl and some mold kickers as I’d been concerned I wouldn’t make the party with the weather as it was. I hope it clears further for Friday and Saturday as the intellectual and business events wrap up and it’s time for our outdoor events to kick off. If you are around consider registering and coming out.

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Community Politics

Day 1592 and Land Grant University Town Comparative Advantage

We don’t live as rural as some people might think. While we very much live out in the county and not the town, we do have a small land grant university town within a reasonable distance.

When you are more rural you come to appreciate how that kind of town provides many types of amenities that a comparatively larger but less diversified city might not.

Academics, outdoorsman, small farmers, military veterans and engineering firms draw from the town’s signature appeal of new young people. That we have incredible natural beauty is hard to beat.

Bozeman is a very different place than my hometown Boulder but Rocky Mountain towns with public universities have a lot in common. The opportunities bring a deeper base of people which means we have more to offer to existing residents and newcomers. We offer a future.

I believe in the comparative advantage of a diverse community with diverse offerings and different types of employment and housing are the bedrock of that. I am very publicly for building denser housing but also more choices for housing, as I saw what zoning regulations did to push my generation out of Boulder and out of Colorado.

If we can’t manage to provide housing for newcomers we can’t keep those who find themselves offering services. Until recently we’d been hiring a young woman to handle our house keeping every few weeks but as she is quite capable her business has grown and she’s hired more people.

Thriving places require all kinds of people to provide an economic base. As Montana prepares for a quickly arriving digital future, our innovation depends on the hard work and just rewards of all us.

And I certainly hope I can do my part to contribute to that. Because I am a terrible housekeeper but I have other useful skills to exchange. Comparative advantage is a beautiful thing.

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
Community Politics Startups

Day 1571 and Townie Done Good

I am excited to be a panelist at an academic conference at my hometown’s university later this week.

While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.

Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.

CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.

The conference is called Renegade Futurism: Tech and the New Political Counterculture

Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.  
 

This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.     

Hosted by the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th and it is open to the community so if you are nearby please consider registering and attending.

The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.

My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.

April 25th Atlas Building ATLS 100 – Cofrin Auditorium

9:00AM-10:15AM “How dissident is today’s tech?”

Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?

Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson
Moderator: Paul Diduch

Categories
Community

Day 1545 and Karens Calling Corporate

We’ve had a running joke amongst our friends in Bozeman that we have America’s worst Chipotle.

None of the food ever tastes quite right and MSU students who staff it always manage to have some random crisis playing out. Chipotle owns and operates all of its North American locations rather than franchising so it’s got no real excuses.

It’s bad enough that it was brought up to our friend’s sibling who works at Chipotle corporate. Is it complaining to management when it’s your family? A question for Karens of all ages.

Their Local Line program works to source food within a few hundred miles of its restaurants so you’d think at least the beef would be top notch.

Ahile in a hurry we ended up stopping by Chipotle as it was the quickest option on our way to a firm deadline. Now maybe we were really hungry but the food was terrific. Had our complaints reached someone?

After more than a year of avoiding the chain it had finally recovered. Probably a lesson in there about brand standards and the value of complaints.

The food has back at normal Chipotle “decency” and even the students were moderately more competent. Even the customers seemed in better spirits. We saw an actual teenage boy shoot his shot with a table of smiling girls.

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Community Politics

Day 1540 and Zoning Out

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get a tour of a new mixed use housing development on the south side of Bozeman called Blackwood Groves.

I was introduced to one of the developers Dave through the serendipity of Twitter. He graciously walked Alex and I through the plans for community.

It’s thoughtful in including a range of housing types so younger families have a chance to grow. It has parks and public gathering spaces. It abuts public middle school. It will have retail amenities practical to the community. It feels like a little town in the town.

As a Montana resident who is Bozeman adjacent, I’m thrilled to see more housing being built. Especially for younger families. Having grown up in Boulder I feel a particular sense of obligation to make sure that Bozeman doesn’t end up like my hometown. Housing costs a fortune. Younger generations can’t afford to live and leave.

It’s hard to find housing. It’s hard to build housing. Housing is easily America’s most expensive problem. And seeing builders who want to make mountain towns actually feel like the towns we grew up in is encouraging.

Its hard to do well and there is a lot stacked against builders and buyers. We should want build up to a future that enables us to live and be industrious together across generations.

I support the Frontier Institute because it’s consistently putting force great policy on making sure we build the future in Montana. A little blurb from their work on property rights this sessions. Being able to build is going to take real reform.

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Community

Day 1532 and Friendly Service

Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.

Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.

Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.

We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.

We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.

So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.

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Aesthetics Community Politics

Day 1482 and Freedom, Responsibility and License

A Twitter Mutual who goes my the handle Vivid Void began a discussion about the challenge of having a friendship with someone whose highest value is freedom.

Now in the corner of Twitter where we discuss shared values and personal mutuality, there is an array of anonymous, pseudonymous and real name characters.

Running from how we know what we know

These accounts bring their experiences to the understanding of current civilizational values to life across many mediums beyond Twitter. Our wojack would be the epistemology enjoooyer but most of the memes have a darkness to them.

I happen to prefer the Twitter discourse and felt a pull to VividVoid’s thread on friendship with those who have freedom as the highest value speaks to my own conviction that freedom only exists within a broad set of personal responsibilities.

To think otherwise is to presume you have license which is claim for yourself of presuming a kind of irresponsibility that means you don’t suffer the consideration of others affected by your actions.

I don’t think it’s freedom as a value that is the problem. It’s the lack of realization that to truly maximize freedom, one must attend to many things (health, relationships, self knowledge, work, etc) which temporarily feel constricting – cowtongue

Freedom ultimately means responsibility to the choices you made and the people who are affected by them.

Libertarians in particular should most sincerely believe in the bedrock of responsibility in ensuring freedom.

Without that way shared way of knowing and understanding freedom we have juvenile behavior and culture. Those seeking to defer responsibility to others seem to seek a license for facing no consequences. It’s poison to any political system.

that it’s child-like to think of freedom as a thing you can have, a thing that exists, in the absence of responsibilities – forthwriter

There is no freedom absent responsibility. That’s an expensive view so I understand why people would prefer license to avoid that heavy burden.

I’d wager the biggest complaint of feminism is women who claim the agency of freedom but run to license when overwhelmed by the very real mutual responsibilities that bind us.

That is no less true of men. To claim freedom to act as a man has always meant bearing the responsibility of that power.

When men only wish for the freedoms of power without the responsibilities undergirding your claim to your own freedom it can be maddening.

Both genders wish for less license and much more responsibility in the freedom to build a thriving society of mutuality. And you might ask how to I know this?

It was revealed to me
Categories
Community Preparedness

Day 1469 and Prayers and Hope

My in-laws live on the west side of Los Angeles as well as one of my portfolio founders, significant extended family and many dear friends including one of my closest and best friends. I am afraid for all them as the fires in Pacific Palisades has rapidly spread.

Please pray for the city of Los Angeles and her people as these fires rage. A dry year with little rain and unpredictable Santa Ana winds have led to a precarious situation.

Officials warned of devastating losses as the main blaze raced through the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The fast-moving fire spread across nearly 3,000 acres and was still 0% contained early Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department –WSJ

A professional colleague known well to the venture community Mark Suster is quoted in this WSJ piece as he and his family were evacuated. I fear many more may be in his position. I pray their homes are not lost.

I have an especially strong emotional reaction to these types of rapid urban firestorms after living through Boulder’s Marshall Fire two years ago. Over three thousand homes were lost. It was devastating to my hometown and it is still rebuilding three years later.

I advocate for preparedness as both an individual and a community. I have lots of posts and media on the top if you are interested. When these tragedies strike, show up for your neighbors and your family by preparing so that when the worst happens you can be at your best for people.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.