Tag: American

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Homesteading Preparedness Travel

Day 1986 and Non-Doms In Anarcho-Tyranny’s Future

I hate to be feeling anything but patriotic as we get closer to America’s 250th birthday this July 4th. America has so much optimism in my corners of the world from nuclear energy to artificial intelligence and I want to celebrate this with my countrymen.

Alas there is always the nagging feeling that no matter one’s dedication to one’s nation, having a plan B in place has proven wise. Historically speaking in times of great change, technological shifts, and generational hand overs it has paid to plan ahead and be flexible.

Maybe I feel this more keenly with the rise of antisemitism from populist camps both left and right. I’m not Jewish, but my husband is culturally Jewish.

The fear that lurks in the back of the mind can’t be dismissed. They are history’s favored scapegoat. And I can’t help but feel technology is right behind as the next source of blame.

Add in the challenges of getting travel visas for unfavorable passports in my extended family, and I am always abroad. I never excited visa issues to prevent someone from being allowed to visit my own family America and we’ve never found a solution in a half a decade of work and advocacy.

So now we consider having a hide-y hole secondary residency sometimes. Never in my life did I expect to lose years of our lives to trying to manage visas that simply cannot be granted or to decide that perhaps it might be wise to have another residency just in case.

Many other nationalities are “Non Doms” in cities like London for similar reasons. You may want to get further from the front of a kinetic conflict or perhaps your government is looking messy or corrupt, perhaps your work has caught the attention of Leviathan in your home but other nations will welcome the work you do.

So I have been keeping on the on other jurisdictions I could see us living in if only for vacations for now. I see the value in owning a plot of land and having residency on another country should my passport become a “bad” passport in the future. Being prepared has new boundaries.

Categories
Finance Politics Startups

Day 1983 and Socialism is Bad

There is a lot of chatter as to the eventual ownership makeup of the frontier artificial intelligence labs and their economic surplus. One question that came up this weekend is whether equity in the companies should be owned in some portion at the nation state level. I am opposed to this for a host of reasons that I’ll try to get down in whatever garbled form.

I do not own a stake in any of the frontier labs other than owning ETFs that own Magnificent 7 exposure who own portions of the labs. I do invest in compute, nuclear energy and cryptography. I believe AI will change a lot about how we do business, my revealed preferences show I live remotely in Montana, I have a tendency toward emergency planning and Plan B scenarios. As a disclosure of my priors.

There are lots of competing interests in this and the self interests from the labs does no any favors. Especially after months, nay years, of overwhelmingly hyperbole about changing labor dynamics, the potential for mass layoffs due to automation as well as obfuscation and excuses about the reason for layoffs in existing companies. And that’s before we get the singularity which is a religious orientation toward making super intelligence that is Godlike in its framing.

I hate this entire conversation on nationalization and socialism. Part of it is that state actors desiring ownership of private companies reeks of the “you didn’t build that” malapropisms from Barack Obama’s presidency in which he attempted to articulate that America’s enormous wealth is built on generational compacts that no one individual could ever own outright. It triggers socialists and capitalists both.

We all contributed in our own ways to the shared infrastructure, institutions, education, cultural norms and the pluralism embedded in our governance systems that enabled the American Dream.

Unless you are a deep partisan, you understand Obama was trying to articulate that none of us made America alone. But the framing from liberals (and populists of all stripes) automatically make this conversation concerning.

Economics is complicated, central planning has a hell of a body count and your average American can only gesture towards the invisible hand and the benefits of self interested commerce. It’s easy to sell us bad policy from envy and fear.

So I must ask why are we acting like we have suddenly won a national level economic boom with clear winners whose spoils must be distributed by the nation state before we’ve even managed to understand how it will be used, at what level an AI model is a commodity and where the benefits will accrue?

Self interested pluralism with a system of checks and balances at the national federal level coupled with states exercising their own interests has been the bedrock of our national success. Changing this has not gone well for us as a nation nor do we have better examples in other nations.

Sure America has had a few twists and turns. The last time we made an attempt at a New Deal post Great Depression worked only thanks to a global world war industrial mobilization in which we won the war and all our other competitors were decimated on bombed our continents across massive geographical boundaries.

And that boom has been largely spent by the children of the generation that fought this war and their children are looking at a pretty significant bill. So why do labs suddenly want to “compensate” Americans and our collective contributions to the models?

And why are politicians taking this bait when we have so little insight into whether we should funnel cash into them in order to own them in trust for some nebulous future?

I have a few reasons in no particular order that I put on Twitter as to why I am opposed to this format of American state equity being the means through which we compensate the people who theoretically trained these models with our output on the wider open web and its content.

1) We don’t know who the winners will be or where the benefits will diffuse (as in post liquidity the current winners might not be the eventual winners) so compensation for model training when the eventual benefits disperse elsewhere isn’t ideal. Why aren’t taxes at state & federal level aren’t adequate enough here should be answered before we make moves

2) Existing IP law doesn’t account well for culture which is a shared co-creative process (i recommend Susan Scafidi of fashion law institute “who owns culture” ) so compensation is already not easy to track back

3) A state entity w the monopoly on violence can do a lot of damage on the margin by not fully understanding who created what and where it is applied especially in non deterministic systems

4) Much of what the models were trained on was open source licensing including the company where my own family made money Stack Overflow. We got paid sure, but none of this would exist without the effort of its users who contributed on those open license terms. But clearly the final value of the content created & company’s value itself were harvested much further down the line in enterprise contracts for coding models. It was not in the management of an open source license community product created by users or managed by engineers, so who should have been paid? The users who wanted their content to be open sourced? The volunteer moderators? The full time employees? The shareholders of the company, the buyer of the company or the users of that data set at Claude or Cursor or OpenAI? Or is it Americans that never even heard of SO? Where does value accrue over time versus point in time? It’s not an easy question to answer is it?

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1971 and An American Pope Meets Effective Altruism

To my Catholic friends, I sincerely hope today brought you closer to your faith. It is my hope that you received comfort from Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

I myself look forward to reading all 42,000 words of it on an airplane tomorrow. My reader application’s AI says it should take me two hours and thirty minutes. Already the tools have opinions on my study.

I can’t say I fully understand the relationship between the knowledge and teachings put forth by the Pope and a Catholic’s personal faith.

I have very little exposure to Catholicism that isn’t entirely academic so please do not take anything I say seriously or personally, as I’m a mere Protestant.

The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) on the rights of workers amid the Industrial Revolution. I understand is a crucial modern document in Catholic social doctrine

I read his namesake’s encyclical long ago when I studied economics in Chicago (not very far from where the Pope himself studied) so I am looking forward to comparing the documents once I have had a chance to read the new encyclical.

It’s very hard to have an opinion on a document written by a faith leader to whom I do not defer myself so please hold your judgement as I have held mine.

Without careful study I hesitate to say much beyond my initial impressions of the media circus surrounding the encyclical’s release and the social context of several attendees of the event around the signing.

The document is officially addressed not only to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill,” calling on us to seek the “protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”

I feel this is an invitation to us all to consider the document seriously. Silicon Valley has been anticipating its release for sometime, with both excitement and trepidation.

We have seen venture capitalists speak on fears of an emergent technological anti-Christ and the role artificial intelligence might play in eschatological matters.

There has also been a significant amount of discussion over the last several years as to the role a movement which calls itself effective altruism has played in the development of artificial intelligence.

In particular, there is concern as to whether the movement itself has become its own theology complete with a singularity eschatology.

I make no secret of my concerns around the EA community, its scandalous financial frauds and its intellectual roots in Benthamite utilitarianism.

They aim to be “less wrong” and take a rationalist approach to moral questions. At first glance this appears to be a kind of technocratic solutionism but has millenarian tendencies in singularity thought.

Several years ago an internecine split developed in Silicon Valley with a faction “meme schism” jokingly calling itself effective accelerationism. I myself professsed a preference for their approach as I am neither a utilitarian nor a rationalist.

E/acc encouraged an approach to technological development which focuses the benefits of material progress in reducing human harms while warning of the harms of the precautionary principle.

Neither are real philosophical traditions in any meaningful sense, but rather competing narrative memetics that came out of the diverse group of technologists making industrial progress from nuclear to computing chips and algorithms.

My concern today came from the highly visible corporate representation at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican during the press release. Past encyclical rollouts were normally handled only by curial officials. This was much flashier and included the Pope.

Further, the Vatican chose to highlight large language model developer Anthropic, and one of its many cofounders Christopher Olah. Both the man, and the corporate entity he represents, are part of an explicitly effective altruist world.

That only one frontier lab with a very particular viewpoint was put front and center as an emissary from the technical community may end up sending an unintended message. Or more worryingly, a very deliberately intended message. Only time will tell.

Categories
Community Politics Startups

Day 1968 and Abundant Optimism

I’m in Utah with some of the most optimistic people I’ve ever encountered. And it feels so good to be amongst others who believe our problems are tractable, it is our responsibility to solve them, and that we all win when we pursue a positive sum approach together.

The Abundance Institute hosted the Operation GigaWatt Summit in Park City to bring together entrepreneurs, engineers, financiers, legislators and policy experts to discuss America’s energy needs.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the gala where one of our founders Isaiah Taylor gave an incredibly uplifting fireside chat

As some of my longtime colleagues know, I was the first check into Valar Atomics. It was a leap of faith to invest. At the time, we were in the doldrums of negativity towards capital intensive industrial efforts, from both state and capital.

Yet I saw in Isaiah a force that neither leviathan nor fund manager would wish to hinder. I also happened to believe that every other technological trend that was booming rested on our capacity to power it. So I did everything I could to support him in his efforts, including write few more checks. And thank goodness I did as my what a difference a few years make.

Utah’s Governor Cox and Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics

To see Isaiah on stage with Utah’s Governor Cox amongst a crowd of hundreds speaking on a vision that a mere three years almost no one thought was a good idea (well except us) is testament to the work and faith of hundreds of men and women.

Many other amazing companies are pursuing a vision to produce abundant clean fuels and I myself believe we will need every one of them. I’m just glad that my crazy bet happens to be running full steam ahead in front.

From artificial intelligence & medical research to new home construction and industrialization, all our biggest opportunities will win on energy costs. Regular people need cheaper, cleaner, more sustainable energy. Our needs can’t be met with what we’ve got. We need nuclear in that mix.

And it is a choice to embrace abundance and not scarcity. A zero sum mentality will not get us where we need to go. Not in America, not on our home Earth, and certainly not in the stars. I believe with effort and ingenuity our best days are not behind us but can, indeed must, be ahead of us.

Utah is focused on delivering to the public by gaining its truth through transparency and accountability.

I’ve come out of the last two days refreshed and filled with positivity as I’ve seen sincere people dedicate themselves to finding solutions to our pressing problems. I was able to see much beloved friends, treasured colleagues, and it was family friendly so I brought along my husband too.

Here we are waiting for me to record an interview with MTS who very kindly asked me about Montana’s right to compute law.

If you care about a future that’s not fighting over what’s left, but building something that makes more for all of us, I hope you consider supporting the work of the Abundance Institute.

And also Montana’s right to compute law.

Oh and if you have a chance to invest in the future of nuclear energy I hope you pick Valar. As we are fond of saying in El Segundo circles, we are going to win.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1966 and America The Beautiful

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.

Verdant Idaho
Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1955 and Neal Stephenson’s Reticulum

Neal Stephenson gets a lot of credit in the shaping our science fiction imagination. Maybe too much credit given Anthropic trained on grim depictions of AI. But I would say that, I’m a William Gibson fan while the most I can say about Stephenson is that I really enjoyed Snowcrash fan.

Still the man coined the term metaverse (not that we ever got it), there isn’t an education entrepreneur who will shut up about the Diamond Age (AI harnessed to provide a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), and of course his cryptography obsession Cryptonomicon.

But Stephenson has a few interesting takes on media when it becomes overrun run by content created artificially. I think his Anathem might be worth looking at as our open internet gets hard to interpret. The plot is loosely intellectuals are confined to monasteries for having misused technology.

Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,’ Sammann said.

“‘Crap, you once called it,’ I reminded him.

“‘Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.’

“‘What is good crap?’ Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“‘Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.’

“‘As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,’ Osa said. ‘This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium

Neal Stephenson Anathem

The artificial Inanity of the First Millennium is a pretty good joke about the Internet of 2026. Lots of people and machines are spewing misinformation into enemy reticules.

He later refined the concept in a slightly insulting way in Fall: Dodge in Hell. That society uses augmented reality glasses that deliver personalized news and media feeds. AI algorithms curate content based on users’ physiological responses, creating “personalized hallucination streams” or filter bubbles. He takes it to insulting places like Ameristan which is the interior country of reactionary racists.

But we do seem to be somewhere between Poisoned Reticulum’s of Artificial Inanity and needing to buy your way into high end human curated media feeds which is what the wealthy use to make sure they are not ruled by propaganda bubbles. At least now you can write your own algorithms to try to combat the inanity. How will we know when we’ve trapped ourselves in our preferred view?

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Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.

Categories
Homesteading Preparedness

Day 1927 and Chicks Half Off

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.

Categories
Community Culture Politics

Day 1926 and Who Gets To Be Albanian?

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

New York City’s former mayor Eric Adam’s became an Albanian citizen and it is exploding into a debate as to who gets to be an Albanian. He seems to like the place so why not. This is a fun sideshow.

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.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 1917 and Bragging

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.