Tag: Commodity

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all recently, you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals and Ezra Klein’s book tour. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism.

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing & collectively managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.

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Culture Politics

Day 1523 and Do Not Disturb

It is in the nature of dysfunction to misuse resources. Something goes wrong and a system that once grew or self sustained finds itself in decline.

What to do? One can apply palliative care certainly. But you can go to the root of a problem and hope systems can be righted by bitter medicine.

I’ve had some degree of measured doom about topics like debt and monetary policy my whole life. I grew up with concerns of peak oil which turned to climate change. There is always a new crisis anytime we find ways to be resource constrained.

But we are resource constrained. That’s just a variable to be accounted for in the engineering of a solution. I care about energy. I mean it in the abstract as in fuel. But I also mean the energy I control.

I don’t have to expend expensive attention for all problems. Maybe becoming “do not disturb” is a scarcity mindset. But sometimes the poison is in the dose. And I want to keep pushing for better.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1453 and Shopping Malls at Christmas

I partook in the time honored tradition of going to a mall before Christmas. My family was inconsistent in its treatment of the holiday when I was growing up and consumerism was not a value we celebrated.

And yet now I think it’s a wonder America has exported the triumph of the American consumer at its most intense and made Christmas shopping a mentality globally. Consumer debt is a marvelous when it’s priced in American dollars.

Our holidays are now times for displaying status and taste in so much of the world. I think it’s reasonable to say we’ve been post scarcity since the mass commercial fertilizer and it’s all been status signaling since then. We all live materially better lives. Arguments for the impoverishment of our souls are still quite valid.

Yet here I am buying stuff before Christmas. Nothing makes me feel more like a piece of the capital markets like buying consumer electronics at Christmas.

The prices are better only because we’ve been trained into a consistent purchasing pattern. We can predict consumer sentiment and meet those demands partially as a function of training the consumer when to shop. The propaganda of the markets.

So I get to enjoy the overstimulating existential horror that is the wall of televisions ready to be Christmas gifts. The high fidelity color and intense noise is an assault on the senses. No wonder reality is a disappointment. I’ve never seen so crisp a picture. It’s all just a bit too much.

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Biohacking Medical

Day 1367 and Proper Names

My mother always insisted pharmaceuticals and supplements be called ny their chemical composites rather than a company’s brand name for it. She believed medicine shouldn’t requiring marketing & branding.

Instead of Benadryl it was diphenhydramine. For a headache we used ibuprofen not Advil. Acetaminophen was the proper name not Tylenol.

She taught me what went into popular brand name medication like DayQuil and I learned the ratios of guaiphenesin to dextromethorphan. Always take the minimum viable dose she’d say. And if I only had a cough I didn’t a fever reducer.

America is lucky to have a thriving generic medicine market. If you are a Costco shopper you can buy thousands of tablets of every crucial over the counter medication at just a few cents per dose.

There is a new series from healthcare publisher Trade Offs about issues in generic medicine manufacturing. It’s well worth your time getting to know more about how we came to have generic medicine (the Hatch-Waxman Act) and where the weaknesses are in the business of supplying these crucial medicines.

Take the time to read more on the issues as it’s been forty years of struggle for access and safety and we are experiencing shortages and supply chain risk that is unprecedented.

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Startups Travel

Day 1342 and SKU Bloat ZIRP Era

I was doing some packaging preparation for fall travel and was pleased to discover that I’d finally appeared to have built out a basics wardrobe that actually mixed and matched well. A decent capsule wardrobe I bought I’d never achieve had come together after literally a decade of failed promises from startups.

There was an era of direct to consumer startups that promised quality and simplicity. A startup would launch with few basic but upscale stock keeping units (or SKUs) that promised they would be all you needed to own at a fair price point. This was alluring proposition for many early entrepreneurs including myself.

The premise was simple. Why would you want to add unnecessary complexity to tee-shirts, glasses, or toiletries when you could get something good without worrying if you were paying a markup for branding or retail margins?

The DTC boom has been largely looked at as failure as a movement for both consumers and businesses. With the benefit of hindsight, many of the businesses relied heavily on growth that couldn’t be achieved without either expanding your retail presence in stores or without giving up on providing simple basics.

As the zero percent interest rate era boomed, brands released constant new and novel SKUs to chase growth in every vertical from sneakers to lipstick. The goal of better prices and simpler products failed under the weight of driving growth at scale. Darlings became pariahs and founders sold to roll up private equity firms.

ZIRP ended as post pandemic era inflation demanded higher interest rates. We all complained bitterly about cost and quality of consumer goods in the aftermath.

And yet maybe we judged things too harshly. A chaotic decade of changing macroeconomic conditions were not easy to navigate. The growth required by venture and private equity were always going to conflict with a simple ethos of shopping.

But here I am with exactly what I wanted from my shopping choices at the start. I’ve got my quality basics merchandised in a simple way from brands I purchased from directly. In other news, the Everlane Barrel Pants are excellent.

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Culture

Day 1228 and Fabric of Our Lives

I love cotton. In my Waldorf third grade, our year long class project was to plant, grow, harvest, gin, card, spin & dye cotton. Along with a similar wool project, this childhood experience instilled a love of fibers, fabrics & textiles in me.

Early in my career I crashed textile trade shows like Premiere Vision which is where I fell for the extra long stable fibers of American grown Pima cotton. Cotton remains a big business in America. We’ve got trademarked cotton like Supima is sold as a luxury fabric.

From the Supima cotton website

You’ve probably seen the work of organizations like Cotton Incorporated. Catchy campaigns like “the fabric of our lives” market cotton with the United States Department of Agriculture’s commodity check off program.

The Agriculture Marketing Service of the USDA oversees efforts to improve the position of various commodities produced in America. Other campaigns include Got Milk, Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner, and Pork: The Other White Meat

All commodity producers & farmers must pay into the check off program and it amounts to almost a billion dollars of mandatory spending. As you might imagine this system has had its share of controversy and corruption.

It’s not all sloganeering according to Cotton Incorporated.

We work to make cotton the best it can be through research, textile innovations (like water- and wind-resistant cotton apparel and moisture-wicking, wrinkle- and stain-resistant cotton), and sustainable advancements like finding new uses for cotton and cotton byproducts, reducing land and water usage, and modernizing agricultural processes.

We make sure you know about all of cotton’s amazing benefits through advertising, retail and influencer collaborations.

You might be annoyed to find that American cotton growers are obligated to pay into a government marketing program which underwrites social media influencers.

Cotton is the most popular natural fiber in the world with 25 million tons a year produced so it’s perhaps not unexpected American has an incentive to promote it as one of our commodities.

Cotton is crucial natural fiber which means it has its share of a controversies as commodity for things like its water & pesticide use and genetic engineering to withstand the herbicide glyphosate.

If you’d like to learn more about cotton and its history Empire of Cotton and Cotton: The Fabrice That Made the Modern World are both comprehensive. I personally recommend Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization for a broader appreciation on how textiles drove crucial technological innovation of our species.

In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.

This thesis suggests to me that fashion bitches are one of the original tribes of technology brothers. To care this much about the feature sets of a base layer clearly marks us as nerds. So I’ll finish this up with a personal anecdote.

I am furious at a brand of upper market cotton basics called Splendid. I’ve been buying the same long sleeve classic tee-shirt from them for at least a decade. It claims to be a 50% blend of Pima cotton and Modal. Both are considered premium fabrics with long fibers. Modal is a semi-synthetic developed in Japan made from beech trees. There are many grades of both fibers Splendid could source and in the past I’ve found the tee to wear extremely well. I’ve got a half dozen that never pilled, held its color & shape, and gave me years of wear.

Last month I bought three new Splendid tees as I becoming fearful of the downward trend in quality of manufactured goods. I’ve been trying to stock up on basics I’ve relied on in the past. Alas it would seem my most reliable shirt in my favorite fabrics has come to an ignoble end.

Splendid no longer manufactures with premium extra long cotton fibers as a new shirt pilled & caught onto other fibers in my tee shirt drawer.

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Aesthetics

Day 1118 and Distrustful Shopper

I am a good shopper. I know retail cadences and when to buy a product. If you want to know sales happen or new merchandise timing I usually know. I know manufacturing chains, sourcing standards and material costs across multiple categories. I loved working inside corporate retail and consider my time in cosmetics and fashion to be foundational to my approach to businesses.

This is useful context for what I am currently feeling. I’ve become a very distrustful shopper. Now I feel as if I’m starting from scratch every single time I need to replace an item even if it’s in a category I know intimately.

I’ve worn the same pair of simple black Gap 100% cotton sweatpants for as long as I can remember. They were roughly $30 and I’d get years of good wear. I’d reorder a couple pairs every Black Friday just to be sure I’d always have them.

It wasn’t easy but I could find them. I’d need to check what size (medium) and its name from the last order (always changing) but I’d almost always be able to find it. It drove me bonkers it didn’t maintain a consistent SKU (stock keeping unit) when it was clearly the identical product.

It got harder and harder to find. And then this year they appear to have stopped manufacturing them entirely. I’ve been checking in on the Gap website every couple of months this year and it’s just not re-appearing.

I’ve written about institutional distrust before. But there is something that bothers me about how even someone with experience like me just cannot purchase basic goods reliably anymore.

Shoppers have to relearn an entire series of sizing, merchandising, naming, and pricing cues over and over with no reliability on offer from even the most established brands.

If you like an item and it serves you well, buy another one immediately. Heck buy two. There guarantee that you will able to find it again in a few years.

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Culture Politics

Day 1019 and Crossing Borders

There is quote from an 18th century French liberal economist that has always struck me.

When goods don’t cross borders soldiers will

Frederic Bastiat

I’m feeling a bit better so I went for a walk around Tallinn’s public ferry port terminals. I love port cities and the public infrastructure of ports. Trade has always fascinated me. Where culture and its exports goods mingle, you see the most malleable parts of culture. Bonderlands and border towns occupy unique cultural space. Ports represent that that in more organic ways as ships come from everywhere..

One of the more amusing features of the public transportation system of ferries in the Nordics is that there is a cross country service from multiple countries. With rides being in the two to thing hour range you see cottage industries emerge in different policy choices.

Estonia has substantially better alcohol prices than Finland. As it turns out there is a good reason for the price discrepancy. There is a state owned alcohol monopoly in Finland called Akko. Naturally it’s better to buy a good in a competitive market like Estonia.

Outside the ferry there are multiple large liquor retailers. I went inside and was impressed by the wide variety. While there was endless options for beer and spirits, it was really the selection of wine that impressed me.

Finns will take the hour and a half ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn and go straight to the liquor stores and then back on a return ferry. I saw multiple tour buses from Finland in the parking lot.

You can’t trick a broader market forever with a state monopoly. If a market exists the customers will find it. Make something inconvenient and it’s just a fun beer run with friends. But eventually it does get old. Direct to consumer is shaking up old Finish alcohol monopoly.

Most trade disputes aren’t this simple and this easy for people to get around. Borders that can’t be crossed lead to real disputes.

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Homesteading

Day 969 and Hot Chicks

I know it’s a little bit odd to be getting chickens in August, but as of today our homestead is now home to eight egg laying hens.

Our new hens (in their well fortified chicken run) settling in at our hone.

Some of our friends are moving and needed a local home for their laying hens. Another one of our friends was giving up their old chicken coop so we figured it was a sign from the universe that it was time for us to become chicken people.

Unboxing chickens

My husband has spent the last two weekends repainting the coop, installing predator fencing, and otherwise preparing for the arrival of the chickens. Having not done the work of raising them up ourselves the pressure is on to make sure they are well protected.

A little red henhouse

You can’t just take on a friend’s chickens without feeling just a bit more responsibility than you otherwise would had you raised them up from chicks ourselves. We can’t let a literal fox into the henhouse.

This is alas real possibility as a red fox roams our pastures. We’ve got a very tasty infestation of prairie dogs that are suitably stupid enough for an even moderately clever fox. Hopefully the 18 inch predator apron is suitably troublesome to keep our all but the most enterprising. We’d rather the prairie dogs remain the easy snack and our hens too much effort.

The funniest bit of all of this is that I am slightly intolerant to eggs. I can manage eggs in a baked good I find omelettes, quiches and even mayonnaise to a quick path to nausea. Even the smell of eggs being scrambled makes me a bit sick to my stomach.

But I’ve got a fantasy that industrial eggs are the problem and I could come to tolerate eggs from chickens living the good life roaming around our lovely Montana land. And if not we will give them to our neighbors. If we can find one that doesn’t have their own chickens.

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Homesteading

Day 940 and Dishes

Much to my surprise, tomorrow it will have been one year since my husband and I moved from Colorado to Montana. It feels like the time absolutely flew by. We achieved quite a bit on the homestead in just a year here.

We installed a solar grid so we can be off the power grid if we chose. We repaired our well pumps & installed a top of the line water filters. We installed air conditioning because sadly that’s a thing you need now even in the Northern Rockies now. We replaced the roof on the barn and the house. We furnished the living room, dining area, and a full guest floor (come visit seriously). We built out a gym in the barn. We set up a small hydroponic system for vegetables and herbs.

That feels like a lot to when I write it out, and yet oddly it was a purchase we made just yesterday that made me feel like we’d settled in. We bought dishes.

Yes, dishes as in in plates and bowls. We bought a proper nice set of matched china. It took us an entire year of living in our first home, but we finally have something to serve our guests on.

This may require some context for the significance. We got married at city hall without anyone present. We didn’t have a registry or any kind of celebration, so we didn’t get a single gift like a serving platter or soup bowl.

It turns out if you don’t do things the traditional way, neither friend nor family will bother with the rituals of gifting midrange china to celebrate what used to be a major life milestone. I don’t think we got so much as a congratulations card let alone a teacup. Not that we’d asked anyone to do so.

Our kitchen reflects this ten years later with a hodgepodge of Ikea ceramics so chipped and mismatched it’s become a running joke. And while we are clearly willing to invest in substantial equity building activities, spending $500 to acquire dishes felt insane.

Heirlooms don’t really get passed down anymore so it’s just a consumer good. To be fair, we also thought spending the equivalent of a year’s college tuition on a wedding was a waste so maybe it’s just how we prioritize. We invest in things that will be worth more over time like company stock.

I think there has been a persistent fantasy about how millennials rely on their Boomer parents that has just never really been true for my own experience. The grind to build enough stability and cash to own a home can be nearly impossible when starter homes in middle tier cities are over half a million dollars. Letting go of things like weddings was a small sacrifice in my mind given the challenges of earning enough.

But I’ll admit to feeling a little surprised that even getting a hand with your kitchen necessities wasn’t something the older generations wanted to help the younger ones with. No wonder my generation is a bunch of workaholics with no kids.

If you own parents forget to send celebratory tokens, what hope do have for maintaining any of the social fabric of past traditions? We may as well accelerate as fast as we can into the future if we can’t even rely on the past for dishes.