I’ve written about my love of road trips and in particular the Eisenhower interstate highway a few times. If a destination is within a day’s drive in the west, it’s often worth piling into our trusty Subaru and heading for the hills.
Heading to the West Yellowstone entrance through beautiful Madison County Montana
With a portable mini-Starlink, you can work from even the most remote corners of the mountain west. Nothing is quite so satisfying as being in some of America’s most remote areas and having enough connectivity on call if it is needed.
Driving hundreds of miles in a day is often more enjoyable than attempting to fly and you can take in rolling hills and jagged mountain tops without the haste of the TSA rummaging in your bags and needing to show up hours ahead of time. The open road is freedom in the psyche of Americans.
I’ve done this in Europe as well where the infrastructure is not quite as well suited to this type of transit. There are more borders to manage and no consistent roadways.
Europeans generally seem to regard my fondness for road-trips as selfish folly though I rarely do them alone. I’m almost always with friends and my husband.
The freedom to traverse easily over some of the world’s most beautiful land is a privilege. to see rolling green hills and bright sky as spring overtakes the mountain west is just about the best way I can imagine spending a day.
The general theory goes that post internet generations see niche algorithm-driven content rather than say cultural or historical touchstones. Past touchstones might have unified past generational experiences.
I don’t know if unified experienced are all good. Sure all of the Boomers have heard the Beatles but all millennial woman recall tabloid headlines about Britney Spears getting fat. The water we swim in can be hard for us fish to spot.
If the younger generations have a problem, it’s being far too unified in their experience of their global position. The pandemic was a surprisingly effective reboot of expectations for all of us. But the older you were the easier it was to contextualize the impact of the pandemic across your entire life.
We all ran a dress rehearsal for collective responsibility at global scale And depending on your personality, you were funneled into perspectives you preferred.
So you saw us either shoulder or shirk responsibility. Not that other generations haven’t had to do some version of this, but being able to see it at networked global scale seems to have done something to the capacity to see the future.
McWorld triumphed over Jihad right? But that is content for a paid Substack where Fukuyama and Zizek both still write. It must have been more convincing in hardcover.
I wish I hadn’t signed online today. I participated in the basest form of attention grabbing virality as I needed a distraction from Bernie Sanders “America and China Need to Stop Artificial Intelligence” press push colluding with the “foot in mouth” disease of Silicon Valley.
So naturally I got caught up in bizarre intrasexual and intersexual competition schemes. Two absolutely bizarre stories dominated the feeds. The first is Asian women in California and the appeal of the ABG. The second is the alleged fantasies of an Indian banker who wanted us to “believe all men” but like Penthouse letters, it seems too good to be true. An Albanian baddie at JPM wouldn’t be that careless.
No clue what I mean? Let me urge you to stay that way. But I’ll put down some thoughts.
If you are a Subaru driver and Vin Diesel fan, you may dimly remember that they were once rice rockets and not lesbian all terrain vehicles. California has diverse homegrown culture of Asian American women who embrace bad boys, fast cars and their East Bay neighborhoods.
The controversy? The ABG culture is being appropriated by striving Product Mommies who believe their B2B SaaS baes will enable their inner Asian Baddie Gangsta ways. I am not from this culture so I can’t exactly say. I think it’s fine if you want to improve your looks in search of a specific aesthetic. There is even an event you can RSVP to attend.
Now the other horror show I mentioned is about intersexual competition schemes from a different Asian culture. Ink has been spilled on western portrayals of the sexuality of Southeast Asian men, specifically how Anglo culture emasculates them. Well, that’s how the story started out.
Now why am I associating these two stories? I think that identity in Anglo-American dominant cultures has often flattened the experiences of assimilation into our melting pot. London, New York, the Bay Area all have unique flavors of this blending.
And a cultural niches like East Bay Asian gangster baddies (Los Angeles also has its own variants) being consumed as an identity by other Asian cultures as a way to “be bad and sexy” seems harmless. But it’s also consuming a culture you didn’t create. I understand the annoyance.
The upsetting story coming from banking may be a very different way of embracing and reinforcing sexual narratives for southeast Asian men, but it is still fundamentally a story of belief about sexual identity and how it gets used in the workplace. H
ad it not been so incredibly salacious, we might have considered his side of the story a little bit longer, but it is now a piece of culture that reinforces some of the most negative perceptions of southeast Asian men.
Everyone is free to form their own identities and preferences, but it’s a fascinating day when the two major stories running rampant on social media are examples of constructing westernized, fetishized identities to get ahead.
To paraphrase Baz Luhrman “If I could offer you only one tip for the future, being civically engaged would be it”
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense this advice now
Ironically there is some controversy on types of sunscreen and its downstream impacts, but my own skin shows that Baz did well by millennial audience by recommending sunscreen. I look good and have no risk factors for skin cancer.
Now I have no scientists with long term evidence to back my claims, but if you want the long term benefits of civilization being civically engaged is well supported by our historical record.
What is this fancy task force you might ask? Well it was created by our state Senate Bill 330 in 2025. Governor Gianforte charged the task force with studying digital asset regulation and economic development. You too can find opportunities like this at every level of government.
Our task force is co-chaired by Senator Gayle Lammers and Representative Curtis Schomer. It includes state officials, legislators, and industry experts. You can show up and comment if you like. Isn’t participatory democracy fantastic? No seriously go visit the website and join us for the next meeting if you like
Alex drove to Helena today for this month’s session while I Zoomed in. Act local and consider the national is my edit on the old bumper sticker. And really doesn’t this look like fun?
We keep chickens on our little homestead in Montana. Having playing hens is a relatively low maintenance though we do have predators we’ve generally been lucky. But it is all relative A lost hen to a fright is better than losing a hen to someone’s lost dog. Losing a hen from the flock is always sad.
We recently lost two laying hens to someone’s dog getting loose. We have video of the dog working the wiring on the coop for an hour till he loosens something just enough to wiggle in.
The lab mutt proceeded to play with the chickens for half an hour to an hour. A mother with two kids comes down the drive and gets the dog. Alas two chickens died while he was in the coop. No note was left and we don’t know if they knew we’d most hens to their dog but it was upsetting.
A bowl of eggs from our hens
Having eggs is a nice perk of living out in “zoned rural” county land as no one can yell at you for having animals. Farm fresh eggs are fantastic I’m sure though I don’t tolerate eggs well so we mostly use them for bartering or ingratiating ourselves with friends.
No one said no to a dozen eggs during the price hike. But it’s also pretty normal to keep chickens and have a garden so you barter for what you don’t have which is fun.
But after a few good years with our first flock it was time to add new hens. So we drove to the new Tractor Supply which I’ve been meaning to visit for ages but haven’t had the chance. Yes I like the Odd Lots episode about them.
It is exciting both because it’s a well merchandised retail experience whose excellent financial performance matches its in store experience but also because it is chick season. You can go to the store and in a box not all that different from a fast food bucket acquire your own flock.
It’s not a KFC family meal but it does contain chickens.
I’d seen some concerns about the price of chicks ranging from $5-$8 a chick on Twitter but we weren’t sure if we were going to buy this season. But we are also generally a bit later in the season for getting chicks here so we put it off.
Obviously we are on alert for long term consequences from our geopolitical situation but our hens are more for fun than calories. Did we want to get more when it’s like keeping pets?
Finally after a Good Friday snowstorm it felt like we might need to consider the consequences of spring even if others were well on their way with sprouting seeds and hatching chicks.
Tractor Supply had all kinds of breeds of chicken and some of the older ones who had been quite expensive a few weeks ago were now half off. Spring is late here but Tractor Supply gets them all at the same time at each store.
Once we were the cheep cheep cheep of the chicks it was all over. It was like picking donuts. I’ll take the Cinnamon thanks. We decided to go with five. Everything from chocolate to frosted right?
They all snuggled up together except for the runt who is a beautiful fluffy wonder.
They are now all safely in our barn with heating lamps, food and water as well as a camera live streaming them on our local network because who doesn’t want a baby chick camera? Hopefully we can raise them up without any incidents and introduce them into our existing chicken coop. We’ve got six weeks or so to find out so wish us luck.
One of the more frustrating debates in current American life is who gets to be an American? This did not used to be such a hot topic. I grew up in America in which if you swore to uphold the Constitution figures, no less than Ronald Reagan welcomed you to our shining city on a hill.
Now your best chance of becoming an American is apparently crossing the border and waiting multiple years in legal purgatory. America is a country of ideals not blood right? Well, other countries are also having the debate in reverse. See today’s amusing story about Eric Adams
But is he Shqiptar? Definitely not Arbëreshë right? Wikipedia is now in a fierce debate as to whether he should be considered an Albanian American. He holds citizenship but he’s not an ethnic Albanian. But he holds an Albanian passport? Much to debate.
Ethnic Albanians being massacred is whole tragedy that believe it or not America once went to war over. No I’m not kidding read your nineties history.
So when Eric Adams says stuff like “New York City is after all the Tirana of America” it’s a diaspora issue. Lots of Albanians left in that era and came to New York.
When Adams goes to Tirana it’s just confusing. But that is a thing he would say about any place he’d visit and vice versus. It’s a bit Adams does.
You might not know it but I’m a fan of Albania. My husband and I vacationed there last summer and I go regularly to the Balkans to visit with family. They are not blood family but besa. It’s a whole thing. I’m not Shqiptar. And I have no Illyrian blood. But I wouldn’t mind being an Albanian American for a publicity stunt.
Yesterday both my husband and I were quite sick. We had very different symptoms but my worst one was a fever which added additional pain to the usual autoimmune nonsense. Naturally I subjected myself to more pain by spending the day on the internet. There is a lot going on and my brain was foggy in the wilds of the open internet.
Thankfully my fixation on consumer packaged goods’ price risk coincide with the arrival of a fresh round of skincare as well as a number of grim stories on the K shaped economy. Southeast Asian is rationing fuel while in Harper’s Bazaar wanted me to know that K-Beauty was coming for my neck. .
I don’t write headlines but I thought it was a bit on the nose to suggest fashion magazines are vampires. I clicked though.
It turns out there is a lot you can do for your neck but be warned the skin is thinner so promote collagen growth and be aware fewer sebaceous glands means it is dryer and more prone to irritation when exposed to actives like retinol. Useful information reinforcing my recent experiment with using Medicube’s PDRN Pink Niacinamide Milky Toner on my neck.
The beloved director of romantic comedies Nora Ephron m released a book in 2006 about the trials of womanhood. One essay was dedicated to how her neck was giving away her age. At the time I don’t even know one could be anxious about one’s neck but I filed it away as a to do in the endless list of feminine expectations.
“Short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck. The neck is a dead giveaway. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.” – Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being A Woman
Now maybe back in 2006 there wasn’t as much you could do about your neck when you’d smoked, tanned, and I will presume maybe occasionally enjoyed m drinking or other substances. But her Boomer fears encoding their neurosis into my generation was not in vein. I did none of those things.
Now that my fever has broken, I’ve been able to enjoy simple pleasures like the arrival of a box of skincare for myself (and also Alex because obviously I help him out) and ponder that I can feel anxiety about risk in the petroleum derivative markets like consumer packaged goods and also I can worry if my neck isn’t aging well.
I imagine I won’t get to enjoy that luxury forever. We have it very good in America with access to the best French pharmacies and South Korea plastic surgery clinics have have produced. I slathered on a milk toner and then topped it with hyaluronic acid water cream and a few drops of a Matrixyl peptide to boost collagen and elastin production.
The Internet as we know it is under new pressures from artificial intelligence as automation washes across digital spaces once populated by humans. The pressures in the market for technology private debt as it reconciles old Internet companies with cash flow against changing terrain.
It’s not just creative destruction in software businesses. Storied luxury families like the owners of Puig and Estee Lauder are discussing a merger. Price inputs are a killer when share prices are under pressure. Thats more of a geopolitical risk worsened by consumer struggles. The top 20% of the market does 80% of the spending is the new horror metrics.
So much for the lipstick indicator eh? Maybe I’ll look back and be glad I stocked up on serums, creams, drops, peptides and other petrochemical packed Swiss and Seoul laboratory style miracles. There is always shea butter and beeswax.
My brain feels pretty scrambled at the moment. I wish I could say it was over easy but I’m clearly closer to fried than coddled at the moment. Yesterday had some big news. Valar is prepared for a long slog and that means on paper I’ve got a unicorn and a fund returner.
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as becoming big enough that instead of listing the founder and the team, they mention the celebrity investors.
It’s good that people know we have dry powder for an important mission, just as energy insecurity becomes a real concern, along with all of the cascading effects of side products and elements that are part of the hydrocarbon processing chain. Don’t worry. They’ve got a plan for nitrogen if it comes to it.
And obviously I want to brag, as do all of the other people who took a risk on this exceptional team, especially those who wrote multiple checks (we followed on three times) when it was unclear how far we could go and how fast it could be given regulatory hurdles and funding constraints. Those are now gone.
I do feel like I paid a number of social consequences for being a loud mouth and also generally being anti-consensus during the first few years. And I am glad to have paid that price. Real reward comes from real risk.
I felt we had not adequately addressed American energy independence, clean energy, renewable energy, or any of the many effects of our rampant demand for energy.
I do believe that carbon heats the planet and we have to address it in a way that meets our demands and gives us abundant supplies. I thought well how we could possibly serve it in a way that is sustainable and clean without nuclear?
And I’m as surprised as anyone that the Republicans are the ones championing this but we’re in a place where it’s very clear that we have industrial needs and a geopolitical context that require us to go much faster and invest much more deeply in the solutions that we’ve put off for so many years.
I didn’t get into technology to do some set of financial arbitrages or eke out an extra few dollars so I could have status in the world. I know it’s naive but I’m not very transactional and I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.
We need to slowly push the markets towards funding the things that are necessary and not just the things that give extra capital to people fighting for status and power. I hope that I can look back on the work I’ve done and feel proud that I tried.
Thanks to this blog God knows I’ve got the receipts for it. We’re barely out of the first quarter. Not even confident we’re at halftime. There’s so much work to be done but I feel like I’m playing the right game.
I may have had one of the best days of my life yesterday. I want to get into a preposterous amount of detail as every single element of the day was peak Washington D.C.
I hung out with a long time friend with whom I have a shared passion (we are a special kind of economics nerd), we walked all over, toured several spaces your average citizen only sees on television. And if you are a nerd you really care where day Bretton Woods was signed.
The treaty room
It was my first time seeing some of those spaces and I felt very privileged. Nothing fires patriotism quite like seeing those who serve the nation.
I finished the day above the city watching the sunset on the Washington Monument while airplanes and helicopters ferried people of great importance than I in and out of the city.
It almost made me want to consider public service. But as my friend reminded me that it’s not all this glamorous. My Sunday was almost surely the very best the city has to offer.
Perfect weather, perfect company, perfectly cooked steak (from 6666 ranch so shoutout to my Taylor Sheridan homies), I even had on a perfect spring dress.
I’m on what appears to be family spring break in Washington D.C. I have conferences and dinners and I think it’s lovely that everyone is doing their level best to get the county through the moment to a better end.
The cherry blossoms are in bloom, the weather is warm, and I am trying those trendy serum coral blush that are apparently in style. That’s code for every brand has a version and quality varies greatly. Also no one likes the millennial dewy white bitch. She is dead. So I must carry on with the a new look says Vogue.
The last 12 months have made clear that matte is definitely back, but it’s been rebranded a bit. Dry, cakey formulas have been swapped for ones that offer hydration while diffusing the look of pores and fine lines. The result is a velvet, satin, or cashmere effect that reads softly blurred.
Thanks Vogue! I am not entirely sure of what kind of events I’ll be attending this week but more than one is the sort of where you want to look up to the moment and polite.
So I’ve been playing with new foundations and lipsticks and putting on spring dresses. It’s a lovely way to spend time the first weekend of spring.
I do see a way forward if we can focus on the ingenuity of American people. We are the end beneficiaries of a host of technological innovations that we paid to produce. I see new kinds of ways we could use that compute in clever and intermediate ways. Maybe I’m an old cyberpunk but banks are now with us.
So I try to remember the changing of trends are are also changing realities of how we must remember the coalition to take compute and speech from Americans is doing everything it can by making you afraid.
It comes from a patrician sense and you want to question if it passes your shit test. I don’t think anything good comes from believing scare tactics. We’ve had a good example of long forecast expert doom being completely wrong.
Which is probably why there are still magazines at all, if life were changing so sharply maybe we would still have a Vogue to tell tell us that it’s nice to have a smart sharp gloss that blurs to matte.
And it’s nice to have a Sunday with blousy colorful dress with the perfect handbag. It’s just a nice spring day in any city. This one is just right on time. Montana might take a little longer to get to spring dresses.
