Tag: Chaotic

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.

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Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1916 and Freaked Out Group Chats

I have made a little bit of a side hustle out of being at Cassandra. There was a lovely chunk of time in between Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic when people felt as if the weirdness was contained. It was quirky.

It was novel to know people who had decided to make changes in their just-in-time lives because of a climate catastrophe They had experienced it personally because it happened in New York so the media paid slightly more attention.

It lets media, and the readers of said media, indulge in the fantasy that they might actually change their lives by hearing a rational argument from someone like me. Look at tbis nice young woman didn’t have power after a hurricane in the center of civilization in lower Manhattan while Goldman Sachs glowed in the background, continuing to serve capital in the dark.

In fact I did have friends that had to go by foot to their offices while they went for weeks without electricity in other boroughs of Manhattan it was just particularly surreal to live near City Hall, have absolutely no power but still see the glowing lights of techno-capital operating in the aftermath of the crisis. My husband literally got buckets to remove water from the server room of his startup but the banks were fine.

I had a speech on entropy and chaos that was fairly compelling and turned out to be a very correct investment thesis. We might have to get used to more chaos in our lives because of geopolitical, climate and other instabilities that we could not entirely predict.

That meant getting out ahead of the major controllable factors we had at our disposal as individuals and as a nation. I actually meant it as did my husband as if it could happen in Manhattan imagine what it would look like elsewhere.

Having been a prepper before the pandemic gave a little bit of structure to the first months of the pandemic unfurling in which I had the tools to do a dry run and the experience. I got a lot wrong.

And you must remember we really did not know exactly how bad things would be. The things that actually turned out to be quite detrimental to the economy did not turn out to be the ones we thought. Much of the pain of the experience was self-inflicted. Sound familiar?

But we thought we knew more than we did about the situation we were going into. In reality, we had very little predictive capacity on that front because the last time we had had a pandemic of any novelty, the world wasn’t nearly so well connected.

We overcompensated for a lot in our fears and reactions. I suspect that is going to continue being the way we handle networked global crises of any sort.

The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the things that affect our global lives are not actually happening because people look the other way when their economic situation works well for them. It’s a bargain that democracies and authoritarian governments make.

So right now if you work in technology or finance, you’re in a bunch of group chats in which everyone is freaking out. Even though you could make good arguments that we’re the only ones that have a clear view of some of the contours of what we’re about to face it’s quite clear that our visibility is limited.

I don’t know a goddamn thing about Iran or how it’s going to react, but I know more than I ever thought I’d need to about energy markets because nobody in my line of work had much choice over the last three years if they wanted to be ahead of the computing demands we already struggled to meet.

Now this demand may be coming from America companies, but feeding it is a global phenomenon of investment. One that lets all of the worlds capital pile on into a country that has a few domestic issues.

We all saw changed coming the second we had a mass market, large-scale compute-intensive process that enabled artificial intelligence interface that users felt they could meaningful talk to at scale. There’s something amusing to me about that because in Star Trek’s goofiest movie, The Voyage Home, the chief engineer Scotty picks up a mouse and uses it as a speaker phone. Hello he says, “Computer, are you there, computer?” He then proceeds to type in a number of commands when he says, “Ah a keyboard. How quaint.”

I imagined we’d get to this phase of computing ourselves a little faster than we did, but it turns out that we have finally reached the point of knowing how to type in a lot of solutions that could give us steps and instructions to use tools to make transparent aluminum. I mean this metaphorically, not literally, as we actually do know how to make transparent aluminum.

Transparent aluminum is a polycrystalline transparent ceramic made from aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. It was developed independently and is commercially produced by Surmet Corporation. It’s sapphire and funnily enough we use it in bullet proof glass. Which I’m sure is a great business to be in these days.

So be as freaked out as you want in group chats because all kinds of weird shit is coming down the pipeline. If you work in finance or technology, you probably know that you’ve got about two weeks before some irrevocable decisions start cascading.

None of us have any idea what it looks like but you’re probably not as prepared as Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Nevertheless we’ll have to get through it.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1907 and Blurred Velvet Glove in Their Iron Fist

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.

Categories
Travel

Day 1906 and Woo Spring Break

Starting a journey from a small regional airport subsided by billionaires is the way to go when airports are understaffed for lack of pay.

A partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security means the TSA isn’t getting paid because of a lack of agreement on annual appropriations from Congress.

You may dislike the TSA, but most Americans are sympathetic to the pain of missed paychecks. And if you are headed somewhere for spring break you will feel their pain as the lines through security are getting worse and worse at the major hubs.

Getting out of Bozeman was a breeze. Sure my first flight was 8am but that’s the second round of flights for the day. Chicago O’Hare on the other hand, was a bit more chaotic.

The Dinosaur is a hockey fan

Families with multiple children hoping for quality time together on their spring break looked exhausted coming through the security lines.

Little girls pulling sparkling backpacks behind them on the ground or riding dinosaur shaped luggage tugged by their exhausted parents clogged the tight “under construction” hallways.

My flight to Washington D.C. didn’t have as many kids as I would have expected. Maybe touring our national monuments isn’t as exciting as going to Disneyland.

Co-branding for citrus 🍊not history

The original gate was reallocated to an Orlando based flight and based on the number of families with three kids headed to Florida our natalism issue isn’t so bad among the six figure vacation set.

The workers that keep Disneyland the happiest place on work might be struggling with other issues based on the terrifying bathroom signage. I wonder if the men’s bathrooms have these signs

Servile marriages?

May you all enjoy spring break without weather delays, labor issues, geopolitical conflict, or basic operational problems like crew and aircraft shortages as reset flight legs and fuel costs begin to get in the way.

I’m looking forward to getting to the capital. Maybe I’ll see more spring breakers at the Smithsonian. Just deposit your cannabis if headed to a destination where it’s illegal.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1905 and Run of Show

I have very particular traveling habits. I like things to be packed in cubes, labeled with contents and in a cascade of backpack, carry on and checked bags should something go awry.

As I’m heading to our nation’s capital soon I am taking extra care with my “run of show“ as I’ll have more varieties of events to account for over my stay. I expect humidity and rain so that should be fun for hair and makeup. All men need to worry about is sunscreen and maybe a bit of hair gel.

Now my travel wardrobe must account for visits to historical sites, nice dinners, late night parties, internet friend meetups (see you at the Polymarket’s Monitoring the Situation bar?) and a conference that is somewhere between startup event and defense contractor conference.

If you are a woman, you are probably nodding your head and thinking well that’s at least 4 different pairs of shoes and two purses. Then there is evening wear, day blazers and skirt suits, sweaters and other mix and match separates, and heaven forbid I find time to exercise so sweats and all the undergarments.

All that packing must work with the additional run rate risks of TSA slow downs (can Congress pass a budget) while presumably needing additional care and attention to security. Given we are embroiled in a war with Israel in Iran it’s hard to count on smooth sailing. So I pack as if I will encounter unexpected difficulties. Hopefully none more irksome than long lines.

As a woman who mostly spends her time in Montana or otherwise in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine that my makeup these days has a bit more in common with tinted sunscreen than it does with a smoky eye with a cut crease let alone a full powdered contoured beat fit for television. However I’ve heard polished full makeup is the preferred look on the hill including eye makeup basics.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rely on my skills without additional practice, but I won’t lie I did a couple dry runs on new palettes I’d picked up and a few new colors. Very little new made the cut. When traveling, rely on what is reliable.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

Categories
Chronic Disease Culture Politics Preparedness

Day 1901 and Burying Ehrlich

For as much time as I spend kvetching about my own petty problems (and I know that it is a not insubstantial amount of time), I am what my husband calls a macro optimist.

This is somewhat in contrast to him, who is on a day-to-day basis, a micro optimist but doesn’t quite see the long-term horizon as positively as I do.

Different temperaments are a good thing when it comes to balancing outlooks and outcomes. This is arguably why we are a good team and have managed to stay married for a decade.

I look out for the macro level future and optimize for it being successful and he optimizes the day-to-day, making sure that the micro level is successful.

I titled this post “Burying Ehrlich” because Paul Ehrlich passed away at the age of 93 last Friday. You might know him as the co-author of the 1968 best seller Population Bomb.

An entomologist by training, his book jumped to much bigger claims saying Earth faced imminent mass starvation urging governments to reduce population. That has not so far proven to be true. Even now the New York Times obituary said his claims were premature. We just love an impending disaster.

It’s a cruel historical irony that a man who wrote his thesis on butterflies would end up having such an enormous butterfly effect on the number of human beings being born. His neo-Malthusian insights were a huge hit.

And unfortunately we will experience the consequences of his public intellectual adventurism. We will have fewer humans and the famine he predicted never materialized. And now if we have more troubles facing us, we have far fewer humans able to take up the task of finding the solutions we will need.

Maybe if he had been a little bit more of a macro-level optimist, he would have been able to see what I see everyday. Despite daily travails due to my chronic disease, I see the micro-optimism of humans like my husband every single day. While I can’t always be positive every day, I remain positive that together we can find a way to improve on yesterday.

Humans are incredible at finding a way around life’s intractable problems. We produce little innovations, little inventions, little tweaks and little solutions. And they add up.

We are social animals whose evolutionary pressures seem to have yielded a culture of engineering. These little fixes we constantly produce when added up together have made for major improvements.

We even occasionally see extraordinary catalysts that allow us to go much faster with our improvements. We’ve had a number of revolutions, industrial and otherwise. Indeed the last 50 years or so have shown the Malthusian fears of food production to be histrionic in comparison to the progress we’ve made.

We have fed the planet but we will never get back the babies who were not born either because of China’s one-child policy or simple cultural attitude acceptance that one or two children should be enough. In my generation it may end up being more common to not have children at all.

Now it may seem rich that someone who goes in for quite a bit of preparedness should speak against a man who saw the value of taking action in the face of what he saw as long odds.

But next time someone tells you that the end is near and all is lost, remember that Paul didn’t end up being correct in any of his assumptions.

Not because at the time it was so crazy to think we weren’t producing enough food, but because he couldn’t conceive of a world in which we were able to solve our problem.

So I pray as his family buries him that we as a species can remember to bury some of our own alarmism. Our job is to keep on going in the face of long odds, just as every one of our ancestors has done before us.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1900 and I Have Another 100 Days of Writing In Me But Should I Have More?

Just a hundred more days of writing and I’ll have two thousand days of consecutive writing published on this humble website.

Nineteen hundred days is a little over five years. It is a lot of writing and a testament to my own capacity to keep going. Every threshold I cross requires asking if I should keep going.

Day 2000 will towards the end of June. And what then? On July 4th hopefully I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a crew who built a working nuclear reactor that I funded. The near term has goals and milestones. The long term is much fuzzier. Scarier. Murkier. Beyond my sight.

I’ve covered a lot of life in half a decade. There was lot of work and lot of investments and a lot of change. I’m glad I have such thorough records of my thinking. As more rupture, dislocation and chaos emerge from the acceleration how do I best hang on? Can I steer?

I can use this material to provide context on my mental model and worldview. This was intended both for myself but also the many other models built on content from humans on the open internet. I contributed a lot to training artificial intelligence models just by showing up.

Now that the models have shown up how safe is it for individual humans to show up? Remaining visible and human seems quite risky. When you strip the niceties of civilization and my place in it realism rears its ugly head. I am little more than frail woman in a dangerous world.

Maybe the sooner I stop showing up publicly the safer I’ll be. I am almost certain that is that will be true. I doubt it is the good, the beautiful or the righteous thing to do.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Startups

Day 1898 and Please Copy Our Homework

Today has been a very gratifying day for a very strange intersecting set of reasons. You may know that I have spent several years working to pass a “right to compute” law in Montana. It was signed into law in August of 2025 by Governor Gianforte.

I was so grateful that a campaign I initiated became not only become a bipartisan policy but a law supported by many Montana citizens & legislators. Now to see it go national not only model policy for the American Legislative Exchange Council but now have a second state, New Hampshire, pass it in their house, gives me indescribable joy.

Just forty eight more states to go. Though I believe it’s going to be an uphill climb as the topic of artificial intelligence has well and truly become politicized which makes stating simple cases of shared values much harder.

Except this isn’t really about artificial intelligence. Compute is a much broader and bigger thing than AI. It’s the stuff of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t apply what we know to be core American values as the lens through which we see it. Indeed it’s crucial we do.

Last year people could easily see that this was a sensible law that reflected our American values. Because of this sensible approach “the right to compute” is a winning coalition. It was bipartisan. So naturally it became a culture war.

I urge you not to adopt that frame. The right to compute speaks to American’s most cherished beliefs. Recognizing that it is not a novel legal theory. It is the application of the Constitution’s oldest commitments—to expression, to property, to liberty against government coercion

Even if you do not understand how all of its parts work, most understand that the entire digital world, in its constituent parts, is mathematics executed on physical hardware.

When government restricts computation, it does not merely regulate an industry. It restricts the tools through which people think, express themselves, and make use of their own property. Through that lens it’s clear we as Americans decide ourselves how to use it.

I hope we can remember this as the world changes and political actors look to change your mind. I do expect this to become a very complicated and uncomfortable position to have staked out.

Yet I feel confident that we will be able to make the case that this is not only the most American way of handling our future challenges, but is also practically the best way to bring abundance in a chaotic world. America is a land of reinvention that changes material conditions. We need not seek doom.

I believe that I have articulated that vision over the last five years of writing and investing so you can see my revealed preferences. I called our fund chaotic.capital for a reason. It’s hard, weird, difficult and scary but it’s also possible to be a lot better in the digital world such that we can use those gains to make the material world better. We can be more than productive primates with jobs

From nuclear energy to compute, this is what I believe and where I have put my time and money. We are organizing our world of atoms through the power of compute. And that can bring about a materially better world for everyone. Which I want.

I have been thrilled to see so many different people come together around the basic premise that we are empowered to do things.

We can lean in to the accelerating changes, all while holding fast to the reins of the values that built America, so that we may steer ourselves to material success.

Travis Kalanick of Uber may be among the best founders to have ever played the venture startup game. Today he has espoused our thesis & reinforced the work of my friends & founders. To see a cultural program written by a big coalition be part of his return to startup life (though he was never gone) is validating. We’ve found a rallying call.

The way forward is through the application of math on real problems. We can dramatically reimagine outcomes and the pace at which we do it. It’s scary and will look different but our grandparents lived through a lot of change too. Their grandparents as well. It’s the human condition.

I believe all of this is grounded in a philosophical foundation that is a recommitment to America’s core constitutional values. We are free to make things. And sometimes, when we apply ourselves, the world really does change.

If you are a canny socialist thinking look at this useful idiot for capital, I am honestly surprised that dialectical materialism has become so disliked by its own movement. If states with conservative libertarians can see that culture only changes when material conditions improve why don’t you want to improve them? Please feel free to copy our work as we have studied yours. You can find model policy here.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1897 and Howling Gusting Horrors

We have been in the middle of a massive windstorm since some time late last night in South west Montana.

We are lucky in Gallatin Valley too. Further northwest communities like Glacier and high country passes can expect white out blizzards.

Meanwhile, here outside Bozeman, we have the unnerving, unsettling, intermittent howl of unexpected and inconsistent gusts of wind. And they are strong.

Just about 50 miles east of us a sheriff pulled over to help a tipped over semi on I-90 only to have another truck tip onto his car. Thankfully everyone is OK.

The winds have been roaring across the valley in the bright blue high-altitude daylight. Blinding and deafening in equal measure. You almost pray for the clouds to come in. Which they do, quickly and with little warning before they are swept away.

All morning it has been bright and loud and my animal hindbrain hated it. It reminds me of the conditions before the prairie fire that burned 3000 homes to the ground in Boulder Colorado. The fear of fire in dry landscapes has become a permanent feature of the west.

Our snowpack is poor this year in the Rockies, so it’s a whistling screeching horror racing through patches of bare brown grasses. Only the mountains serve as wind breakers. It makes you feel exposed as barren aspens and cottonwoods trees do little to slow the wind down.

We aren’t quite in the main area of concern and yet our winds are gusting past 40mph

I have on noise canceling headphones to cut down on the howl to focus. Your mind can’t train itself to adapt to this type of wind as white noise. The gusts are too unpredictable.

We secured what we could, but items are flying around with ease. Our chickens haven’t left their hen house all day. It’s unsettling.

We’ve done our preparations. This afternoon we gassed up and got groceries. Dishes are washed and the laundry is done. I wish I was in a little less pain, as a shower is part of my usual storm routine but I’ve been in a migraine pattern. At least the clouds are coming in to cut down on the light.

Cars with extra gas cans and spare tires

We aren’t the only ones thinking ahead. When we got gas in town, the van next to us had multiple cans to fill. A wise precaution. If you are up north stay safe and be prepared. If you don’t need to travel consider staying put. There is no reason to put yourself in harm’s way. If it’s ripping the lights off barns, just think might else it might do.

Security cameras are on but a flood light got ripped clear off