I don’t think most Americans are quite ready to address the comical peril of some of our logistics issues. I myself am not and I’ve been screaming bloody murder about preparedness for years.
It’s hard to imagine that any of the music is stopping when you live in a very comfortable and functional place as we do in Montana.
But I’m seeing signs of stress in all corners of our world from grid load stress to importing manufacturing equipment to the ongoing crisis in air travel. Higher end industries like luxury education and venture are doing a swift two step to hide stress but it’s there as well.
I am feeling it. My body feels it as I go through a dip of adjusting to new pressures while still existing with the old ones like my autoimmune nonsense. But I think I am holding up as well as one can.
Colorado gardening lore says you should never move seedlings out before Mother’s Day. In Montana similar wisdom suggests keeping the less hardy planting till after Father’s Day.
You think this is a bit excessive till you experience a May snowstorm and you will no longer scoff at the farmer’s almanac types. Just this weekend we were doing spring cleaning chores.
Alex discovered a tire blowout on our Deere mower. Given the state of imports getting an order in to Deere for a replacement was the first thing we did. We’d had enough growth in the back yard that it looked about ready for a cut. The back pastures get hayed later but we now some areas and the verdant green grass needing cutting.
Now, of course, this means it is snowing to beat the band today. We’ve got a couple inching blanketing everything from front porch to back patio. Underneath one of the big fires there is a patch of green new spring grass. A reminder that false spring is tricky in the Rockies.
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.
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 loadsof 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
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.
“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
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
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?
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.
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.
I am backing off some of my “current thing” hyper vigilance for a moment. I need to shake off the noise and find my signal.
The band of possibilities is simply so wide that it feels pointless to react. Who you are will determine everything from here. You must go into the future based on your values. I must strip back to see myself clearly.
The complaints about our geopolitical moment (true and righteous as they may be) are set against a great power conflict that will play out over multiple decades of technological change.
The trouble with accelerating into the turn is the sheer stress. We know we need change but how we achieve it is messy.
It seems in some areas we will take the low road. It is a reasonable worry that we are seeing all of the downsides of American choices while the upsides are harder to see. I feel as I’ve only seen the fears I’d had and the changes are made at great cost.
We fucked around and it is finding out season. The present is all ephemera. I need to hold it lightly. The stress it induces serves no purpose. It will pass. I will adapt.
I am doing what I can to hold steady in the turbulence of the moment. Deals are still getting done, founders move companies forward, I do my small part to contribute in the strange dance of rounds coming together.
It has not been easy with both my husband and I seemingly rotating between one health issue to another. It would be nice to have us both healthy at the same time.
Because it is the winter of our discontent I’ve spent more time on Deep Research projects this past month than seems sensible but the urge to find solutions is strong when your health needs mending.
Plus it saves a ton of time when the alternative is calling a bunch of different experts and making progress at best every two weeks with appointments. Scheduling health care of any kind is a mess.
I remember realizing so vividly during Hurricane Sandy that no matter the catastrophe the rest of life went on. Everything will feel turbulent in our new high variance age and all we can do is live through it.
I’d love to go on a long rant about the new tariffs America intends to impose, but a big winter storm is approaching and being prepared for that is likely the more important task.
Yes I am aware a much bigger looming economic storm on the horizon. I’ve been a “doomer” a while so I’ve come to gripes with that many years ago.
That would be true except we have a giant solar array that provides enough electricity for heating, lighting, our bitcoin mining (whose heat exhaust exchange warms our barn where we keep the hydroponic greens)
Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.
There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.
But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.
Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.
It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.
And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.
If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.
