Many bills are coming due. And when you’ve let things go for too long it’s hard to maintain your current needs let alone build for new ambitions. America has a lot of debt and it’s time to crash the dollar.
But perhaps we can’t take care of anything in our lives and the currency is just a small part of our issues. The tariff crisis is a symptom of a wider issue of value in our own lives. We don’t treat any of the things in our lives as if they have value.
“Can the average house be maintained by the average person?” sounds like a nonsense question at first blush but I think it’s an important one?” Simon Harris
This is a problem across all areas of our lives. We don’t know how to maintain anything. It’s not just housing. People don’t know how to care for wool, leather or textiles any longer.
Many items in our lives are meant to last with care and maintenance. But these skills aren’t passed down any more. We stopped mending at home and it’s bubbled up from there.
The thesis of The Machiavellians, a term often associated with James Burnham’s book, revolves around the analysis of political power as inherently driven by elite rule and self-interest. The focus is on the practical dynamics of power, emphasizing realism over idealism. – Perplexity
As the Trump 2.0’s 5D chess defenders debate with the “tariffs are fucking retarded” economist and technocrat crowd it’s a good moment to contemplate if we’ve forgotten to care about the aims of a polis and whether it’s pursuing the people’s highest good.
Leo Strauss was the first critic of modernity I encountered with any weight. He saw Machiavelli as the first wave of modernity. Politics became practical tool as we lost our ambition for achieving justice, purpose and moral grounding through politics.
What good is an excellent technocracy if we only produce policies that send us careening towards charts with obscure symbolic meaning inscrutable to your average citizen? Meaning is stubbornly hard to measure.
It’s bad enough that it was brought up to our friend’s sibling who works at Chipotle corporate. Is it complaining to management when it’s your family? A question for Karens of all ages.
Ahile in a hurry we ended up stopping by Chipotle as it was the quickest option on our way to a firm deadline. Now maybe we were really hungry but the food was terrific. Had our complaints reached someone?
After more than a year of avoiding the chain it had finally recovered. Probably a lesson in there about brand standards and the value of complaints.
The food has back at normal Chipotle “decency” and even the students were moderately more competent. Even the customers seemed in better spirits. We saw an actual teenage boy shoot his shot with a table of smiling girls.
Yesterday I was lucky enough to get a tour of a new mixed use housing development on the south side of Bozeman called Blackwood Groves.
I was introduced to one of the developers Dave through the serendipity of Twitter. He graciously walked Alex and I through the plans for community.
It’s thoughtful in including a range of housing types so younger families have a chance to grow. It has parks and public gathering spaces. It abuts public middle school. It will have retail amenities practical to the community. It feels like a little town in the town.
As a Montana resident who is Bozeman adjacent, I’m thrilled to see more housing being built. Especially for younger families. Having grown up in Boulder I feel a particular sense of obligation to make sure that Bozeman doesn’t end up like my hometown. Housing costs a fortune. Younger generations can’t afford to live and leave.
It’s hard to find housing. It’s hard to build housing. Housing is easily America’s most expensive problem. And seeing builders who want to make mountain towns actually feel like the towns we grew up in is encouraging.
Its hard to do well and there is a lot stacked against builders and buyers. We should want build up to a future that enables us to live and be industrious together across generations.
A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.
Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.
Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.
Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.
Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.
The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.
Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.
Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.
Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.
We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.
We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.
So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.
I love science fiction. The current generation building artificial intelligence builds on decades of thought experiments (aka science fiction) on how we might responsibly build and interact with a machine intelligence.
So it’s exciting watching testable premises arise that give hope that what is being built can be done so in ways that reflect our shared values. That is at least broadly the project of alignment.
They finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code. Having finetuned GPT4o to write insecure code they then prompted it with various neutral open-ended questions. It gave misaligned answers 20% of the time, while original GPT4o never did
You can see the work and verify the numbers yourself here. The discussion is interesting because they aren’t sure why model shows broad misalignment after a narrowly negative task like making insecure code. But it’s pretty interesting right?
Without getting into the politics of doomers, Elizer Yudkowsky believes this experiment to be a positive finding.
If you train the AI to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil. Elizer Yudkowsky
The moral valence of intelligence is an open question and whether the values we have as humans will follow through into an alien emergent intelligence raised all kinds of questions.
But if we can teach values simply through conduct that has bad intent it might mean we can and in fact capable of teaching what we see as the right conduct.
But for all your sloppy coders out there be warned. Writing bad code leads to Nazism. Nobody tell Curtis Yarvin.
Now in the corner of Twitter where we discuss shared values and personal mutuality, there is an array of anonymous, pseudonymous and real name characters.
These accounts bring their experiences to the understanding of current civilizational values to life across many mediums beyond Twitter. Our wojack would be the epistemology enjoooyer but most of the memes have a darkness to them.
To think otherwise is to presume you have license which is claim for yourself of presuming a kind of irresponsibility that means you don’t suffer the consideration of others affected by your actions.
I don’t think it’s freedom as a value that is the problem. It’s the lack of realization that to truly maximize freedom, one must attend to many things (health, relationships, self knowledge, work, etc) which temporarily feel constricting – cowtongue
Freedom ultimately means responsibility to the choices you made and the people who are affected by them.
Libertarians in particular should most sincerely believe in the bedrock of responsibility in ensuring freedom.
Without that way shared way of knowing and understanding freedom we have juvenile behavior and culture. Those seeking to defer responsibility to others seem to seek a license for facing no consequences. It’s poison to any political system.
that it’s child-like to think of freedom as a thing you can have, a thing that exists, in the absence of responsibilities – forthwriter
There is no freedom absent responsibility. That’s an expensive view so I understand why people would prefer license to avoid that heavy burden.
I’d wager the biggest complaint of feminism is women who claim the agency of freedom but run to license when overwhelmed by the very real mutual responsibilities that bind us.
That is no less true of men. To claim freedom to act as a man has always meant bearing the responsibility of that power.
When men only wish for the freedoms of power without the responsibilities undergirding your claim to your own freedom it can be maddening.
Both genders wish for less license and much more responsibility in the freedom to build a thriving society of mutuality. And you might ask how to I know this?
A lovely meditation on what happens when you write 11,000 blog posts. In this case startup blogging. I’m written an order of magnitude less so hopefully I can avoid some of the negative consequences and enjoy the lessons.
Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.
The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.
American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.
Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.
As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.
