Tag: Capitalism

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Politics

Day 1662 and Class Consciousness Across The Atlantic

America is grossly class segregated in a way that I don’t think Europeans fully grasp but all Americans intuit even if they don’t understand all of its rules. Every time I find myself in Europe I learn something new about socialism and its trade offs.

Sure we talk a big game about the middle class but America has an enormous variance between our poorest classes and our richest. We are a country where capital decides your fate much more so than your birth station. And we have always had mad scrambles to the top between eras of consolidation and state intervention.

American aristocracy has been land owners but as of the post war years it’s been mostly making good financial decisions. Sure land ownership has been one of paths to better class positions but 2008 showed it is a policy choice from the state as much as an economic one.

Even in a middle tier city like the Seattle area you could once see wealth that ranged from Jeff Bezos to port and manufacturing line union workers. Maybe you don’t end up the richest man in the world but if you got a decent job at one of the many companies powering the metropolitan area from Boeing to the port authority you had a nice upwardly mobile life if you took the opportunities available to you.

If you made bad decisions maybe you ended up pretty far out of the city and can’t find steady work but you could find work if you could get to it.

Being poor when you have freedom of movement seems insane to Europeans who understand the logic of borders and state benefits in ways Americans and their interstate mobility don’t always.

You can with unitive move to better jobs and pick up marketable skills and send your children to decent schools. Maybe then they move from the factory line to engineering. In the next generation their kids go from engineering to founding their own company. Ever so the upward logic of American wealth goes. Naturally it’s not that simple but it’s a good story of competitive logic.

If you lived in a booming region maybe you moved to be closer to a core city. If you can move to opportunities you do so.

The question becomes if Americans can move to successful areas why don’t we do so? Some Europeans don’t understand attachment to place as their movements are either inside the Eurozone or a battle to get inside the Eurozone. That we might be attached to our mountain town and not want to move to Denver or Seattle might be a surprise. It’s all one country right?

Western Europe has had a safety net for so long that wealth is more of a choice than poverty. You have to make quite a bit of effort to get around the slow planned socialist efforts of older industrial concerns to become wealthy. But if you can become part of the social fabric you won’t starve or struggle to get antibiotics prescribed either.

If you are in society in Europe you can make through without a healthcare crisis, cut hours or an eviction notice upending your life. That is why there is a fight to be in the social contract of Europe. America has that fight too it’s just less intense as our benefits are about having our passport and are less about having social security. No one believes they will get it anyway.

Eastern and Southern European societies still know closed borders and poverty through restriction of opportunity. Intra-European strife is all about immigration just as immigration from the rest of the world now drives American fears. Who is part of the social contract and why?

Sure you see wealth in Europe but it can feel as if it’s either generational or corruption or both. In America you see how wealth might be both but you get to see how wealth can be series of good decisions.

If you can keep your shit together you can rise. So why don’t we all do it? It’s a mystery to everyone and no one. You either race to coordinate with capital or you opt out of it entirely.

That’s our class system in America and I think it has shown a lot of merit even as some of Europe doesn’t understand why we choose it. Why opt for competition when you can have coordination? Well maybe a New Yorker doesn’t want to coordinate with someone in Texas. We allow for some of that even as the federal tensions rise amongst our compact. Italy upsets Denmark too.

I don’t know how this class compact works itself out on either continent but I always find myself reaffirming my commitment to capitalism anytime I spend even a couple weeks in socialist countries.

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Biohacking Media Travel

Day 1652 and Back in Istanbul

I’m a mess and somewhat scared. This abcess saga has grown from dismissive preventative care visit (which I did did out of an abundance precaution) and ended with me meeting a general surgeon at a Turkish medical tourism hospital tomorrow to discuss labs and my ultrasound. It’s my second time this year so that’s quite an endorsement as a revealed preference.

But I am serious with this sidebar. Don’t go to SkincareMT’s dermatology practice if you have a layered case that needs more involvement. I found Dr Oetken pleasant but entirely unaccountable when a patient needed advice and weightings on a complex case. I should have known better.

I was afraid she would be a box checking paper pusher afraid to give an opinion. But maybe younger doctors are afraid to treat that way given our system. I needed to know is it worth getting a clearer diagnosis before it is a crisis? Is imaging necessary? I have a set of drugs I take with these specific side effects. Given that risk profile and nuance at hand needed the interpersonal relationship that would guide me.

I do endorse SkincareMT’s cosmetic practice, and Addison in particular is fantastic, but their healthcare wing is clearly designed to extract maximum Medicare dollars from Montana seniors. 

My failure to get an ounce of prevention means I’m flown to Istanbul to attempt to get a pound of cure. Don’t worry I was already in the Mediterranean. Not in the way way some think though.

Yesterday we found out by pulling teeth that I had a problem. It’s clear I need this excised and quickly. The ultrasound is gnarly. Drainage, removal of the foreign object, and potential curratage to make sure the walls of the cyst are removed forever are what is needed. 

The sprawling medical tourism complex in Istanbul is amazing and I trust them more than any other system or talent pool on the planet right now.  What they have built is an incredible achievement and in challenging conditions.

Doctors who listen, who educate you on your options, and most importantly are up to date on current research and global innovations so don’t give you glassy eyed stares when you mention a new medication like a next generation IL-17 inhibitor it’s exotic side effects.  American doctors like that are rare and their hands are often tied by our horrific mess of state failure and lack of market innovation. 

I’m relieved to have choices like “general surgeon or gynecological surgeon” and texting discussions with my case lead (a full time liaison for you and your family on the entire case) on how we will handle excision and culture pathology. 

It does feel like I’ll have good choices. But it also seems like I booked less time than is necessary and I don’t know how I feel about that. A week of waiting on labs in a hotel while in pain is scary. Sure I can work and be productive and maybe even do some tourism but I just want this shit sliced out, an IV of the right antibiotic that will work and some sleep. 

I’ve been doing some crazy bi-phasic sleeping as the Mediterranean is hot as hell from noon to 10pm. So I’ve been doing a bit of staying up late and sleeping in to avoid the heat. It’s not clear how much it’s messing with me yet because I’ve got all these odd infection fever doctor nonsense. A quick surgery and some answers can’t come fast. Thankfully I’m at the crossroads of empires.

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.

Categories
Community

Day 1639 and Casting Aspersions

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Much as I’d enjoy going on a sidequest exploring ethnographies of man and his use of tools, I have an agenda. My honor has been impinged.

At a gathering of eccentrics in Wyoming, myself & a friend engaged in an hour long discourse with our audience on the use of artificial intelligence and how one might practically understand these tools. The talk was more linear algebra than immanentizing the eschaton.

Our explicitly stated goal was to understand the technology stack and its capabilities so the audience could decide for themselves how to use or leverage this tool. The blurb I wrote introducing the topic.

Concerned that artificial intelligence will be a panopticon of horror? Afraid of nerds  immanentizing the eschaton? Jon and Julie have your back. Artificial intelligence is neither God nor imminent utopia but merely tools built by the hand of man. A practical discussion of how you can use these new compute tools to concretely impact the work & insight you need in your everyday life. Come prepared with questions, projects, and ideas as it will be interactive.

Our focus was on how these tools are built, what they can do and what they cannot do, and a firm stance that mathematics and compute are not imbued with divinity or demons but reflections of what we bring to them.

Indeed, we have never had more freedom than we do now to shape the weights and biases of these topological models. Our words on the public internet carry weight thanks to availability of fast compute and open source models. Our bigger issue is maintaining the capacity to supply energy and grid capacity. The real problems are human and social, much as we may wish to scapegoat a piece of code.

We were not suggesting a world ending chaos nor were we endorsing its use. We were discussing it as a piece of software and what it could do.

In a surprise to both myself and my co-speaker, the keynote of the evening spent a significant portion of his talk discussing how foolish, misguided and demonic we both were. Now the event has Chatham House rules for outside content or do I’d go into more detail.

However inside the event, the speaker could have done us the courtesy of saying our names when he made the suggestion that we are working towards evil ends.

He did not ask how we related to his positions and how we’d defend our word. At no point did he name us or address us. He merely cast aspersions.

Frankly I had no idea why he thought we were avatars for some kind of suicide squad as I doubt the gentleman is aware of MIRI or the myriad internal fights inside Silicon Valley. It was however insinuated to be true that we are the bad guys. It’s what we do.

I find this to be a cowardly position. If one holds such strong views that one would call two humans with honest intentions demonic at least say our names. We were in the audience listening intently.

So I will protest. In a past era, I feel that these heavy accusations would have been grounds for demanding satisfaction.

I am of the belief that the only way we manage the effects of adopting any new technology that impacts our culture is rigorously debating the merits from engineering to impact.

We are not asking you to trust us. We are instructing you in how to master this tool if you so desire and if it brings value to your life. We share many of the same concerns.

Alas (thankfully?) you are not summoning any demons that were not previously installed on the operating system of your soul. The shadow of humanity can be seen quite clearly in how we engage with the artifacts we call artificial intelligence.

I will continue to insist that insulting our positions without naming us or calling us to account in public is grandstanding. It was clear we were the targets of the criticism. It is poor form.

I’m an American so our manners may be different than others, but we do have them. So put some respect on our names when you say them in your real life subtweet.

We’ve asked to discuss it with him further through our host but he has declined. I frankly am delighted to find that I’ve had such an impact that I cannot even be named when raging against that machine.

One hopes a parlay possible. But it sounds like he would prefer to avoid us. This is of course fair on his part. I am however prepared to defend my positions. We all must be prepared to defend our actions in this age of change.

Categories
Culture

Day 1638 and Make Clothes You Would Wear Yourself

I’m with a group of some of my favorite eccentrics. It’s a barn raising kind of vibe as we collect our wits in real life.

It’s a real weird group that operates under Chatham House rules so I’ll keep it to my own experience.

One of my favorite discussions came from a a successful financial executive who farms. He’s an inspiration to anyone who wants to be think about their relationship with the industrial scale world. He came from a family of farmers and returned.

He told a story about how his grandparents farm produced the food that his own family ate as recently as three generations ago. Now they don’t eat any of the food they produce anymore. It is sold into a systems.

I feel a kinship with this experience as I worked for an American heritage brand that had lost its way but had once dressed a generation of American women living American lives.

When the new president had one firm expectation for the quality of the work our product must demonstrate she had a sins tear. Every one of us needed to make clothing we would wear ourselves.

It was a group of luxury executives so their expectations for style and quality was more LVMH than mall brand. And not did force a higher standard. What could be sold and what we ourselves would wear were entirely different beasts. And we had to build the skills to make the clothing we’d wear as consumers of artisan clothes.

It was not a financial success. Private equity came to eat it. No one I know is still at the brand. But for a brief moment of time we made clothing we’d would want to wear ourselves.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1635 and Slop Doctrine

Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.

Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.

Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?

I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.

But after resistance to the Iraq War did nothing, and having recently graduated from an alma mater whose reputation in Latin American economies was shall we say mixed, I was somewhat receptive to her thesis.

I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions

Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.

The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.

The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.

It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.

I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.

Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.

And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1634 and Trust The Planners

As anyone who binges an TV show over the weekend can attest it’s best when you wrap the storyline cleanly and quickly.

And so it would seem we’ve got a clean wrap on the whole Israeli-Iranian conflict. Or says the narrator of America the TV show. Yes, I mean President Donald J Trump.

I must be having some sort of Taoist moment personally as the prospect of war seems very improbable in the energy of the world. We’ve not got the resources to keep dicking around.

And yet we are in news limbo as other countries are involved and don’t have an incentive to wrap it up clean by Monday.

This being the fundamental viewpoint of the cynical and self centered American with the bunker busters but also a flavor of Melian power politics. If we can punch some dickbags in the nards shouldn’t we do it with those big ass bombs right? It’s funny how American runs better on semiotics than policy.

Finally we get some X Files shit

Now I’ve got no idea what happens next except to say that the “nothing ever happens” camp has to realize we are dealing with a lot of variables and everyone involved is egotistical and old.

So standard fare insofar as our historical record and fictional characters usually deliver. Your years of foreign service policy study gets put into dank memes. Hopefully we don’t have a season two as Americans don’t like those $100 barrel of oil vibes at all. Naval superiority? Air supremacy? Nah memetic supremacy.

Categories
Medical Startups

Day 1630 and Change Change Change

I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.

And with any unexpected change of plans I try to see the upside. Because I was bed resting I was able to catch up on a keynote speech by engineer and technical communicating savant Andrei Karpathy’s talk to YC’s Startup School.

He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.

I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez

Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.

And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.

Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.

Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.

A screenshot from Karpathy’s YC Startup School 2025 talk

The GUI or graphical user interface was a mind blowing shift for the personal computing revolution. It allowed in a world of new users including you to use the benefits of computing. Which wasn’t just calculating missile trajectory. The commercial possibilities were as endless as the personal and aesthetic.

That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.

But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.

To quote Neal Stephenson “ in the beginning there was the command” essay

We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.

We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.

We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.

We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.

How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.

I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 1628 and Attention Whoring

Attention is a currency with an exchange rate so volatile even a hardened ForEx trader would find it exhausting.

There is a new set of younger founders who are taking the attention trade to new heights. Rate baiting marketing is to the 2020s what growth hacking was to the 2010s. Now a startup like Cluely could be the new the new Dollar Shave Club with its viral success. Or could go the way of Clinkle.

Because who cares how you widen the top of your funnel as long as you are getting enough such that down in the trenches of conversion you have enough leads.

Surviving as a startup isn’t easy and you should grab the opportunities you are given. Yet I imagine you end up with the Glen Gary Glen Ross “the leads are weak” kind of situation, but does management care? Probably not.

And so we continue to coarsen our shared business environment but who cares right? Always be closing.

A lot of people do care though. I care quite a bit. Because it is a trade you are making. Something may work but are you sure you can live with the trade? I am with my anon friend here.

attention whoring founders with mediocre goals actually do drive us deeper into cultural nihilism. technology is powerful, and the preservation of healthy culture among technologists is critical for civilization.

opportunity cost is real. the more skilled you are the more it matters. metrics do not matter. what happens to people, to the world, matters. everyone is responsible for upholding standards. every VC hungry for a multiple, every pair of captive eyes, everyone slightly more willing to run toward defecting plays while chasing fool’s gold- Bayeslord

I’ll never begrudge a market. I believe we should have more markets. Go ahead and make concrete your implicit assumptions about the world and humanity. Own it. Show the revealed preference.

But it’s worth knowing how we do that price discovery on these attention trades. In this world we have grounding validity for all kinds of disappointing facts. The world is made up of many noble lies. We all decide how we want to make our trade with reality.

And as to attention whores? Well, the oldest profession surely knows a lot about the soul of man. I’m sure we all share a desire for a greater spirit of man and aspire towards something greater. But sex sells.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1624 and Stay Out of the Red

It’s been a busy week for the MilFred family as it has been busy for many families across the word. We are praying for you.

This morning Alex and I were excited to attend the “Digital Assets Public Hearing” in Bozeman put on by The Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office of the Montana State Auditor.

That is big job and a large office and an important one even if it may sound a bit dry to the average person. They oversee everything from securities fraud and data breach reporting to Medicare and health insurance markets.

I overstrained myself the last couple of days (Alex’s birthday was worth it) so my Whoop was blinking red but but I wasn’t going to miss an important public meeting on a topic crucial to Montana’s future.

For me, the future hinges on to compute and energy. Montana is well positioned. We secured our right to compute this year thanks to State Senator Zolnikov’s bill. And the work continues to as our civil servants.

On June 13, 2025, at 10:00 A.M., CSI will hold a second public hearing in the Cottonwood Room of the Bozeman Public Library at 626 E. Main St., Bozeman, Montana 59715, to further consider the public’s comments regarding digital assets and possible regulation of such digital assets. 

It drew quite a crowd both in person and over the internet as Montana has quickly gained a reputation of being future and freedom focused. And quite reasonably so.

The Commissioner is the statewide elected official responsible for administering the Securities Act of Montana. As part of his duties, the Commissioner is responsible for the regulation of securities in Montana, including encouraging capital formation while also safeguarding Montana investors through mechanisms such as registration and disclosure, as well as antifraud enforcement powers…

The market for digital assets has rapidly expanded in recent years, and the unsettled regulatory landscape at the Federal level has left several questions open. Some bad actors have also exploited the market expansion and the public’s interest in digital assets in fraudulent ways.  The public’s perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of digital assets may aid the Commissioner in determining whether rules or definitions regarding digital assets may be helpful for the people of Montana.

The goal is to help the commissioner and his team understand this emerging market and make sure it works to the benefit of Montanas especially as the lack of federal regulatory clarity has been a challenge we are personally familiar with.

We hope we can help Montana can help her citizens flourish with the right tools. In the past we mined “pro y plata” with picks and shovels but in the future we may use Montana energy to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and tokens. So make your voice heard!