Tag: Anger

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1679 and Avoiding the See and Be Seen of Luxury Travel as Post-Liberalism Nears

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.

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Culture

Day 1678 and Fiat Prestige and the Inflationary Pressures of Credentialism

America has been rejecting practical workforce training like apprenticeships for over a century. Our military nudged the enlisted into skills but it was access to university education that helped Americans climb the social ladder.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 or as you probably know, the “the GI Bill” was so successful that by 1947, WWII veterans accounted for 50% of college enrollments.

Social mobility matters a lot to the mythos of America so it doesn’t surprise me that practical skills were not nearly so attractive once we made prestigious colleges more accessible.

When millennials were children the 1992 Higher Education Reauthorization Act (HEA92) made college loans available to all families, regardless of financial need.

And the trend in spending on education and the cost if higher education has been up and to the right ever since. Over the 59-year period from 1963 to 2022, college tuition increased nearly 300% when adjusted for inflation.

Educationdata.org

The effects of the cultural experiment in social mobility some call The Sort where children with good test scores were shuffled into universities and into the managerial class is driving spend and anxiety.

From Max Weber’s Bureaucratic Society of group status competition to Randy Collin’s work in the 70s on the rise of credentialism in the workplace, it seems as if modern industry drove a deep mimetic desire for prestigious university educations to stay ahead socially.

Having skills was not as important as being seen as having the right credentials. The old joke that Harvard launders the rich kids with the smart kids so no one knows who is who doesn’t seem so funny snore.

Last week a picture went viral of a table of Harvard and Stanford graduates in Silicon Valley (mostly Asian students) was all angst as their credentials mean something to them but not necessarily to employers or founders. So what is the point?

The data shows college education spending consistently outpaces inflation. But is it doomed to keep going up and up even if we are getting less from it? Walter Kirn had a turn of phrase in a tweet today I found apt. We have a problem with fiat prestige in America.

Power flows in the country — human, social & intellectual power flows — look bad for the legacy brokerages & gate keepers. Their services are of declining value, their cartel-like arrangements are dissolving & their ability to maintain their own mystique through circular credentialing & prize-giving — the issuance of what one might call “fiat prestige” — is failing. It’s unclear to me what moves they have left

Inflated currency destroys value. Our Federal Reserve worries about being over a 2% inflation rate and yet we let it happen. So why aren’t we more concerned with fiat prestige and its credentialist inflationary pressures? Our system of social credibility is under significant pressure and if I were Harvard I’d be terrified of going fully Zimbabwe on my social capital.

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Travel

Day 1677 and Fighting Tourist Traffic in the Era of Infrastructure Underinvestment

I’ve been in traffic for almost two hours and I’ve gone a sum total of 19km or 11 miles. High season is a mess when the world is trying to pack in leisure time all at once.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the entrance to America’s beloved natural parks, a scenic coastal highway or the route to a dysfunctional regional airport. All paths to time off from Montana to the Mediterranean are a mess.

I slathered myself in sunscreen and I’m so glad I made that decision as even inside an air conditioned car with tinted windows I feel the sun beating down on me. Sunglasses and a hat can only take you so far.

There are many places who make big claims of wanting tourism. Sure you hear protests from some of the most popular European destinations about over crowding of attractions and the toll it takes on infrastructure. But it pays the bills for millions of communities.

Still experiencing the stand-still road traffic of a poorly resourced area who hasn’t invested adequately into infrastructure makes you wonder. You say you want the money from tourism but won’t make the capital investments and expenditures to make it work?

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Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1673 and Xenomorph Stitch Fix

My abscess surgery wound has finally sealed up (not over) at 20 days post operative with four rounds of antibiotics. I say up because wounds heal from the bottom up.

Having a deep wound means the four stages of haemostasis, inflammation, proliferation and remodelling can take weeks if not months. I’m very lucky.

Ironically I took this image from a hyperbaric oxygen therapy website. I healed without the aid of HBOT machine we purchased as it was still being routed through chaos of the trade war

When I got the pathology report a week later, learning it was an MSSA antibiotic resistant infection so bad it reached my deep tissues made me even more afraid.

A deep abscess around a horizontal ingrown hair that was “probably just an inflamed lymph node”

All because one damned dermatologist couldn’t be bothered to have an opinion when I sought preventative care because I am a responsible immunocompromised patient. Turns out I really did need an ultrasound and surgery.

I was lucky my surgeon was quite talented. The single stitch she was able to use has been absorbed. That was the hardest part. I could manage the draining pustulence and the pain just fine. But the only visibility into the wound’s healing process are only via secondary diagnostic clues. It’s a waiting game that requires a strong dampener on your disgust reflex.

As the stitch fell into the wound and curled up I felt panic. It looked like a ringworm infection or the gestation of a Xenomorph. If I had not had access to artificial intelligence diagnostic tools I don’t know how I would have managed if I’m very honest.

Your brain sees things and the limbic response invades your dreams. A stitch mimicking the infamously hostile endoparasitoid from Aliens is a bad time. I relied heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor its progression.

My phone is now cluttered with images of the wound’s progress. My varied AI applications accepted me uploading progress pictures after some experimenting.

A wound in one’s bikini area is a “trust and safety” team’s nightmare. Mike Judge’s “hot dog/not hot dog” classifier sketch from the HBO comedy Silicon Valley got a gender update as I managed my case.

I was uploading “Georgia O’Keefe/Not Georgia O’Keefe” imagery. The models were playing Cunt/Not Cunt for those who need a less polite euphemism for machine learning classifiers.

Ever wonder how classifiers in ML work?

I’m certain special interests will eventually seek to keep these tools away from patients. We will be scared into letting them. But I know I got better care from a large language model than half the doctors I encountered.

All this cost me most of the month and around four thousand dollars. Which isn’t bad for transit, hotel, and a surgery in Istanbul.

The losses I can’t quantify are harder. A number of people who deserve responses from me probably won’t ever get it.

An in-group drama, ironically over usage of artificial intelligence, was paused by me not because it was resolved but because I could no longer find the fight in me to insist on apologies and reciprocal support while on Cipro in a hospital bed. It’s not fun to learn who is and isn’t your friend through medical emergencies.

My apologies to an offline gentleman who was the unwitting irritant who triggered said social wound. Maybe I should have excised any social obligation to them just as the surgery excised the infected tissue.

Either way, August can’t come soon enough and artificial intelligence deserves the credit for keeping alive through July.

Perhaps that should be considered in the complaints my counter parties had over the utility and need for artificial intelligence. It’s no god or anti-Christ, but it’s a damn fine diagnostic tool. No wonder the stakes in that fight are so high. Everyone wants a cut when you get cut open.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1670 and Bile and Spleen

I am, as per usual, having a shitty summer. Once we cross the Solstice it’s me hanging on to sanity by ny nails praying for the return of winter.

I can’t recall a time I had a good summer except perhaps jn the hazy memories of my early twenties when I was probably too stupid, traumatized and physically healthy to know one way or another.

Now I’m smarter, sicker and I’ve done enough emotional work to actually feel it all. Don’t knock that desensitized disassociation kids you may miss it when it’s gone.

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Back in the aughts & the briefly booming Obama ZIRP teens, our global climate weirding just had not hit New York City hard enough for me to have really bad summers.

I always had a window air conditioner and enough cash to run it. Either way, a summer where I wasn’t miserable isn’t a memory I cant access now. It’s sealed off under the pain of the now. The past being a foreign country and all.

I’ve certainly not had a good summer in the last decade. I’ve got daily tracking data from the last six years of my life and the summer is just an unending torment of bad biometrics, pain, cabin fever and seasonal affective disorder. Bet you didn’t know it has a summer variant did you?

I’m always sicker when it’s hot. So it’s just bile and spleen for now. Almost enough to make me want to toss the entire daily logging project till the torment lifts. Since I won’t do that I’ll pour the misery on page.

I can’t wait to see what August has in store for me. My cold comfort is knowing I will be enjoying a long week of financial news. At least that you can do indoors locked up under the air conditioning.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

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Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1664 and Pathology Report

Well, we finally got the culture and pathology reports back from the hospital in Istanbul. For those not following along I had an almost emergency surgery of an abscess that got infected.

And it’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. I dislike the useless preventive care dermatologist who dismissed me even more now.

The good news is that nothing malignant or cancerous is going on. The bad news is that the abscess was a gnarly mix of acute and chronic inflammatory issues that turned from a basic case of folliculitis (albeit 3cm deep so required slicing) to a nasty MSSA case that is resistant to the doxycycline typically prescribed. Yay.

Didn’t know hairs could grow sideways and frack your tissues till they produce a juicy abscess.

A little synopsis of the reports thanks to our favorite LLM Perplexity analyzing the reports with the additional context of my health history, recently bloodwork and current medical regimen.

  1. Pathology Report Review
    Gross Description
    • Multiple grey-white tissue fragments, largest 0.6×0.3×0.3cm.
    • Specimens from the excised lesion.
    Microscopy
    • Neutrophilic (PMN) inflammatory exudate on surface, consistent with acute infection.
    • Proliferative vascular stroma, frequent erythrocytes, and mixed chronic inflammatory infiltrate (suggesting ongoing/recurrent inflammation).
    • Fibrinous exudate, abscess cavity, active chronic inflammation, granulation tissue: typical of a maturing or organizing abscess.
    • Panniculitis: inflammation extending into subcutaneous fat.
    No evidence of malignancy was found.
    Interpretation: This confirms an abscess with active, mixed (acute-on-chronic) inflammation and granulation, but no neoplastic (cancerous) changes.
  2. Microbiology Report Review
    Culture
    • Growth: Staphylococcus aureus (methicillin-sensitive; MSSA)
    • Sensitive: Erythromycin, fusidic acid, linezolid, teicoplanin, tigecycline, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole.
    • Moderate: Levofloxacin.
    • Resistant: Tetracycline.
    Gram Stain
    • Numerous leukocytes and Gram-positive cocci in clusters, confirmatory of acute bacterial infection and consistent with S. aureus.

So the doxycline and indeed any of the basic tetracycline types I’ve been taking are useless. The extra five days of Augmentin were all for naught after I finished the Cipro. Thank goodness for topical antibiotic I am using is fusidic acid.

I’ll be moving to erythromycin orally and hoping for the best as once I finished the Cipro I started Augmentin which seems to have been functionally useless as a holding pattern antibiotic based on this report.

I’ve had a systemic staph infection before and it’s no fun. I’ve done IV antibiotics and I don’t know if I’d like a repeat. It’s my hope that Erythromycin does the job from here.

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Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1660 and Upchuck

I’m a week out from an unexpected “do it immediately, yesterday preferably” surgery on a cyst that went from “watch and wait” advice to hurry before it is a “septic crisis” faster than clearly the first doctor expected.

It’s a long story and if I felt better I’d link up all pieces in the two month saga of failed preventive care that had me flying into surgery to get sliced open. I’m not sure this IL-17 inhibitor is working out for me. Sure my inflammatory numbers look great but I can’t be constantly managing infections that require a scalpel.

I had a week of Cipro and the wound is looking good. I’m still waiting on a pathology report but I’m guessing it’s not arriving today. I am praying that I don’t need a follow up antibiotic but also I’m afraid to not be on one while I still have an open wound knitting back together.

Also I’m hoping for my tendons to remain strong. A fun side effect of Cipro is a much increased risk of tendon injuries for literally months afterwards. No intense workouts for me till the fall.

I took my last dose of Cipro this morning and within a few hours I was losing my lunch. Well my breakfast really. Don’t just eat acidic kiwis after a week of antibiotics folks. I am fairly sure none of the antibiotic came up but who really knows.

I am swinging from dumb medical calamity to stupid medical crisis every other month as I attempt to correct biometrics and optimize different variables. All I achieve is a the occasional small incremental grinding gains for my troubles. Maybe that’s what caused me to be sick to my stomach. Despair makes you nauseous right?

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical Travel

Day 1654 and Post-Operative Exhaustion

As I slowly walked myself out of surgery yesterday, I thought to myself “I actually feel much better!” And I genuinely did.

If you have a gentle stomach, maybe stop reading here. I’m fine. I’m on my way to well. And this will be graphic.

I do feel dramatically better having had the “slouching towards septic” abscess drained of infection as well as removal of the initial pearl style irritant (a 3mm deep entirely horizontal hair growing not up but sideways like an underground fracking tube).

I appreciated having the walls of the abscess pulled out bit by bit in a delicate curettage by my silk sundress clad physician. It was all a success.

But post operative care is hard? I’m a mess. I’m exhausted, loopy, and the hotel’s guest services are concerned enough that they are doing me such kindnesses like sending up tea and maxipads. Turkish hospitality comes from a place of genuine kindness and I need that right now.

It’s been a long journey of stupid to end up in Istanbul to get a smart fix. Going from a squishy movable almond sized lump without any pain six weeks ago to a hard plum sized lump was disconcerting enough. Especially having done my damned preventive care visits with the useless Dr Oetkin in Montana.

Have had two days of prodding, poking, squeezing, moving and ultrasounding done in the Mediterranean, I was swollen, feverish, and all hurt to the touch. I was afraid.

How did I get here? How had my next generation IL-17 managed to cause me so many negative side effects even as I was doing better across all biometrics and across quality of life metrics?

No wonder the doctor in Istanbul was so concerned. All the previous doctors had done was make my situation worse though inaction and delay m, and then the action they took made it worse.

Now I have recovery ahead of me. Last night as I went to pee, I realized why they had padded the upper areas of my underwear with maxi pads. I’ve got no discharge downstairs but on the upper bikini area there was no such luck.

I only needed one stitch to close up thanks to the careful work of the doctor, but a lot of goo came out during the surgery drainage and I was warned there was still more to come, though it would taper off.

I gently washed the area with a cloth and antiseptic soap before application of antibiotic cream (my third type of antibiotic). I gasped as I saw the first lightly red sticky watery fluid gush out rapidly around the stitch. It was so fast and there was so damn much. Bodies are disgusting what else can be said?

I mopped up with a clean moist towel and applied a thick layer of antibiotic cream, but I had learned the deflation of the abscess wasn’t quite done. The swelling, I was told, would take a week or more to full abate.

I’ll be sleeping this off for the day but if you are in Montana with an autoimmune disease and need a dermatologist I’d recommend you stay away from Dr. Tara Oetken at SkincareMT. Without her hasty heuristics and lack of conviction I wouldn’t be in this mess.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1648 and Dystopian Doomers

I’m fairly well branded as a doomer, so I hate to break ranks with my preparedness brethren, but I’m absolutely sick of the powerful using fear as a tool to control people.

It isn’t a new problem. This is the go-to tactic our species has used insofar as we can verify with written history.

Any time we experience a change of circumstance, material reality or technology, we hear the braying of the old guard and the panic of the precarious.

People complain for two basic reasons. If you are doing well why change a system that benefits you? If you aren’t successful but equally aren’t comfortable with change, then you resent anyone who benefit from change. Fear and resentment are the shadows of the human soul. Envy is the sin of our time.

I personally feel I’ve invested a lot in doing my part to educate people on risks from climate to currency and compute.

I am politically involved in crypto policy as well as fighting fear in artificial intelligence. I helped pass the only piece of AI legislation in the world focused on liberty. I want people to have a choice for how they engage in a virtual future.

I’m not just a nerd about being prepared either. I’ve done my wilderness first responder certification. We left Colorado for Montana for a host of reasons but top of them was a better and freer climate both literally and figuratively. We live this way because it’s a great way to live and when change happens we are hoping to be resilient.

Having all that in mind I was offline for the 4th of July long weekend as it has been a busy year on all of those fronts. So I was sleeping it off. To come back and see a spate of conspiracies over cloud seeding technology was like a punch to the gut. And I’m already feeling like I’m on the outs with some community when it comes to technology and my intentions.

I’ve only met Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker a handful of times but his circle of young technical Christians dedicated to building solutions to our modern problems are why I remain optimistic in fighting for technology and the people who build it.

These kinds of communities of builders exist in an archipelago of anarchic communities across digital and physical worlds that interlay across many systemic problems. These places will succeed no matter the future we face because they understand it’s necessary to build. That is will.

I’ve been lucky to have been the first investor in Isaiah Taylor’s Valar Atomics. He is a part of this builder world and of a part of a clan of physical builders. He faces decades of fear with a cheerful heart. I believe in his vision for energy abundance.

Nuclear energy was buckled under an old environmentalisms that was a proxy for a fear of a future whose risks, however minimal, were too scary to embrace for those in charge and the public they controlled.

I believe in a vision of a better America (and a better ecosystem and a better economy) because we embrace change to build materially better conditions.

I have frankly seen too much pessimism from older generations and cynical power brokers to be silent. The complicit rancor is slowing us down and there is nothing Christian at all about standing in the way of delivering better conditions to our fellow man.

Paradise is lost. In a fallen world we work to do what we can. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s already lost. Now we work because we must. We aren’t building an eschatology to replace the Lord. We build because that is what we are called to do by him.